 
### Sixfold Poetry Summer 2014

by Sixfold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 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 Summer 2014

Anne Rankin-Kotchek | Letter to the World from a Dying Woman & other poems

Sara Graybeal | Ghetto City & other poems

Tee Iseminger | Construction & other poems

Lisa Beth Fulgham | After They Sold the Cows... & other poems

Mary Mills | The Practical Knowledge of Women & other poems

Monika Cassel | Waldschatten, Muttersprache & other poems

Michael Fleming | To a Fighter & other poems

Daniel Stewart | January & other poems

John Glowney | Cigarettes & other poems

Hannah Callahan | The Ptarmigan Suite & other poems

Lee Kisling | How the Music Came to My Father & other poems

Jose A. Alcantara | Finding the God Particle & other poems

David A. Bart | Veteran's Park & other poems

Greg Grummer | War Reportage & other poems

Rande Mack | rat & other poems

J. K. Kitchen | Anger Kills Himself & other poems

Jim Pascual Agustin | The Man Who Wished He Was Lego & other poems

Jessica M. Lockhart | Scylla of the Alabama & other poems

James P. Leveque | Three Films of Jean Painlevé & other poems

Kelsey Charles | Autobiography & other poems

Therese L. Broderick | Polly & other poems

Lane Falcon | Touch & other poems

Ricky Ray | The Bird & other poems

Phoebe Reeves | Every Petal & other poems

David Livingstone Fore | Eternity is a very long time... & other poems

Tim Hawkins | Northern Idyll & other poems

Abigail F. Taylor | On the Pillow Where You Lie & other poems

Joey DeSantis | Baby Names & other poems

Cameron Price | Every Morning & other poems

David Walker | Sestina for Housesitting & other poems

Helen R. Peterson | Ablaut & other poems

Contributor Notes

Anne Rankin-Kotchek

### Letter to the World from a Dying Woman

for Ron Garson

Approaching 44, I just feel it's over.

I lie in a kind of permanent autumn:

my bones talking back,

shoulders curled in a parenthesis 'round my heart,

& any remaining veins of hope tangled in despair.

Don't ask me how I got here—

I can't make you understand

something you don't want to know.

But like the sky I have a story to tell:

wisdom I might have passed on to a daughter

if only she had arrived,

things I would have said to myself

if only I had listened.

Now, I see it clearly: there are many ways to die—

some of them don't even involve death.

You might come to know this later.

Or you can listen to me now,

before your song is up & while my urgency to speak

succeeds my tendency to descend.

The thing is, somewhere to the left of your spine,

your soul is waiting to tell you

everything you need to know.

Stuff like this:

the best way to deal with regret is to

do what you want in the first place.

And, where it is necessary,

do not give up or give in.

But also, where it is necessary,

give up & give in.

The road less traveled isn't always on the map,

but seek it without waver,

like a dog pursues his home.

If you wait too long for the green light,

you'll spend your life stuck in traffic. Go ahead.

Mix apples & oranges:

the world needs more fruit salad.

At least once a year, check out the way

pinks collide with orange in the sunrise.

Remember not to give your heart

to someone you don't trust with your head.

If you grow the little voice inside of you

(add plenty of music & moonlight), it will

take you where you need to go.

Your skin also has a voice, so listen.

In fact, let your body do the talking.

Swim in the air & dance in the water.

Don't forget to try an ocean on for size:

no matter who you are it will be a good fit.

Be sure to bring enough air. Your lungs

were meant to be filled & emptied, just like your days.

Tend to a living thing as though you're being graded on it.

And get to know the earth on a first-name basis.

But don't take the rain personally.

Life is very, very, very unfair.

Sex & doughnuts can help,

but they're not a permanent cure.

Most of all, find love

in the answer, the question, & the pause in between.

And when you step outside

the lines drawn by all of your others (even you),

treat yourself like the bliss-bound, spring-leaning

creature you were always meant to be.

Then come back to tell me all about it,

before my song is up & while my urgency to speak

succeeds my tendency to descend.

### In the Wake of My Father's Orbit

for Marty Rankin

He was a brilliant star, but

he was damaged too.

He gave off an entirely different

sort of light, and we were transfixed,

forsaken as the contrails of his angels.

I see him standing in the corner of our kitchen,

the distracted mathematician mumbling numbers

(never realizing that we were growing

and multiplying in space and time).

And then the sudden flash of anger, stunning

in its own way:

such potential for pain and shadow.

Everything about it was distorted:

the way we looked up to him—though

we had no choice, held under nature's sway—

and how it mattered to us so the way he shone,

how his brilliance glittered off of us

and splintered us in a thousand ways.

On Sundays the six of us knelt beside him on the pew,

our palms pressed together, fingers pointed upwards

like candles reaching for a flame.

With every "Amen" came the shame:

we would always disappoint him.

But his light was a prism

we could not turn away from,

even when we knew

it would grow us crooked,

break us into dark shards.

### More Than Candy

Night. Feels later than darkness.

Way past a child's bedtime.

We have no bedtime.

My younger brother and I climb

out his bedroom window

opening into the summer air,

buoyant as dreams.

Big plans.

We fly off the garage roof,

jumping to the ground and roll.

Old pros.

Sometimes others tag along.

Tonight we're on our own.

Two tadpoles.

Our parents, unaware as always,

sit inside with Johnny Carson.

They never laugh.

It's the other side of the house.

More like the other side of the moon.

We smile, bikes ready

to carry us anywhere.

As far as we dare,

Brian says with his eyes.

We sail under the stars, shooting

for 7-11 like it has all the answers.

Pedaling in our high-tops,

we wade through fireflies

with the flurry of superheroes.

We are the great escapers.

Inside the store, the choices

never fail to dazzle.

We own the aisles, but we know

it isn't about the sweets.

We choose our favorites

and head back into the dark.

I turn to my brother

as he unwraps a Reese's.

I love him more than candy.

### The Journey

for Margaret Elizabeth Regina

But after a while the road seems to drive you.

And that's okay, if you like

mile markers and weigh stations

that measure nothing of importance

the whine of your tires on pavement

endless potholes and truck stops

speed bumps and rumble strips

the white lines and orange cones

highways that leave you low

exit ramps that steer you nowhere

faded billboards and tires blown

signs to places you'll never go

and if you want your steering wheel

to serve as the compass of your life.

But you know me.

If there's a sky above

then that's my path to the sea.

And I'd rather be

musing with a mountain,

wondering what the crows know,

making plans with the firs and pine,

knowing I can take my time,

and not let my travels

be decreed by the speed limit

but by how fast—or slow—

my heart wants to go.

### The Only Prayer

I can't do the big prayers:

don't know the Rosary,

won't crumple my torso over my knees on the floor—

arms outstretched with audacity.

You won't find me facing Mecca, or

orchestrating the _Amidah_ ,

or waiting for the wafer silently hunched over the pew.

I have no idea how to bow

(or to whom)

and may submit that flailing on the floor in foreign tongues

or slipping notes in the Wailing Wall

will almost certainly ensure one's heavenly requests

remain unanswered.

Sometimes, getting up in the morning is

the only prayer I know,

the best I can offer

to whatever deity

may or may not be

waiting for me to tumble humbly out of bed.

Sara Graybeal

### Ghetto City

My students have created a board game

Out of cardboard, tape, and staples.

Ghetto City, they call it.

A numbered path leads to a 3D hut

With a restless stick figure in the window.

The goal: reach jail and bail your brother out

Before getting shot.

We play the day John's brother gets booked

And the day Kareem's uncle comes home.

We play the day of the middle school shooting,

Two kids with guns, none of my students,

Nobody hurt. We play as if these things

Make the game all right, safe still,

Hypothetical.

When funders visit, we hide Ghetto City

Under a red sheet in the back of the class.

My students cross their arms, discuss the impact

Of arts enrichment on their lives.

When we play, I am usually the first to get shot.

My students love the way that this makes sense,

And all the ways it doesn't. When I suggest

A new game, they are disappointed in me.

It doesn't work that way, they say.

### General Store Café

All day, jazz. At a blue table, Masquerade dancer painted on top

One hand cradling a jug of wine & a white clown face

Glittery scarf, arched eyebrows, dotted eyes

On the walls stained glass, green & gold

Bounce light every which way, winding

Wind chimes, shelves painted lilac, housing

Cloth dolls, home-made post cards, wreaths

Disheveled over rims of chairs, a bookcase of local books

That we don't want to read

But will pretend to

When forced

To, when there is no one else to share our table

So much jazz: oil paintings of farm animals

Pig snouts blowing kisses

Herons psychedelic lime green & pink

A sack labeled _Product of Colombia, 70 Kilos—_

To which twenty-first century soul

Did this old thing appear artistic?

Rabbit wind vanes, painted wood critters

A forest goddess cloaked in hand-stamped robes

Carly's Grab 'Em By the Cowtail mocha

A plaque stating _Love me, love my dog_

& butterflies swinging from the ceiling.

A woman walks in, eyes wide, lost stare

Her sweatshirt spelling _United We Stand_

Can I get a coffee, she says, trips

Over the frayed rug, bumps

Into the boom box, plastered with

Bumper stickers & rainbow flags

The radio stutters, shifts from jazz

To Christmas tunes

Jingle bells jingle bells, faces fall flat around the café

What is this CVS music? This gas station music?

What is this music that turns my mocha bitter?

That spins the butterflies idly, that nauseates

The herons in pink-green waves, that reminds me

I am spending twelve dollars & eighty-six cents

On my organic fair trade in-season spinach quesadilla

Music that sounds like my grandmother's house where she

Stuffed my stocking, read from the Bible

I do not visit Grandma now

She cringes at my unshaved legs

This music, these fucking lullabies

That make me want to snap shut my laptop

Step outside, reach my fingers to the sky &

Hold the world close; no

Not the café—

Hold the world close; recall that

These are two different things

I am a citizen of both &

One is begging

Eat your spinach quesadilla for the right reasons &

Switch the station now & then, if only for a second because

Just jazz can get to be too much.

### Did You Hear That, Just Now?

Zimmerman not guilty.

Trayvon Martin dead.

In South Philadelphia,

Silent streets: a sleepy fig tree,

Bony cats stalking their prey.

Is rising up too much to ask

On a July night like this one,

Wearing rage on our bodies

As we do on our Facebook pages?

Are we all so weary, so unsurprised

That a march is unattainable,

That the fury of our solitary brains,

Our fingers whipping across the keys

Are the most we can offer up

In the name of solidarity?

If it were the sixties, millions would have marched.

If it were the nineties, streets would have burned.

But it is 2013. The numbers ring apocalyptic.

Sidewalks are bare. Windows so dark

It seems all souls have departed.

I am Trayvon Martin

We are Trayvon Martin

The cries, once smothered by sirens,

Forced entries and the clink of handcuffs

Around the smooth wrists of brothers and sons

Stand no chance against this silence.

Boarded windows splinter open.

Potholes yawn. They will swallow

These cries by morning.

These homes, vacated of hope,

Will soon be yoga studios and

Montessori schools. And finally,

The fight—the few voices still

Murmuring over candlelight

In buildings slated for demolition

By winter—will drift to places still

Worth fighting for. I cannot tell

Whether or not they will be missed.

Tee Iseminger

### Construction

They sold the empty lot next door last month,

the one with the tree, the tree my daughter

climbed all of those mercilessly long, stagnant

summers, made her teenage cradle in, read her

borrowed books. The tree whose limbs overgrew

the property line and rubbed against our lives until

we no longer remembered that it wasn't our tree, and we,

or maybe it was only I who came to depend

on the sympathy of its freckled shade on our breakfast

table, the table where my husband and I sat suspended

each morning in forbearance, in our own early fall, these

seasons of not saying, of not knowing what else we might

possibly say, and so grateful for the scratching of branches.

It came down more quietly than any of us expected; one

day we simply noticed that we had poured our orange juice

in a spot of warm sun.

"We won't be a bother," the foreman had shouted from

over the fence as I as pulled tomatoes that Wednesday,

the last time I saw that tree.

I'm afraid you will, is a thing I could have said.

### Tuesday Morning on the Way to Rehab

This is the you I will press to a clean new sheet of memory,

you asleep with your shaggy head against the dirty car

window—do you remember when I still cared to stop

and to wash things?—and with this newly exploding

sunrise in the glassy space beyond you, as pale as

you, as ignorant as you of a future I fear may not

include either one of us. Or maybe the memory

to keep is three years ago, when you were just

beginning to fall apart, when I was still sure

that there were so many chances, so many

chances out there for you. It's getting late

and we should hurry, now. You are small

and changing fast, reducing. By sunset

you will have shrunken back from the

framed edges of this picture, farther

than you were yesterday, farther

even than you were early this

palid morning, less you than

just an instant ago—please,

is there no way to save it

now?—there is all of

this history and I

have nothing but

you to keep

it in.

### Ways We May Have Been Wrong

I am watching your sister through the window, waiting for the bus.

The rising sun behind her has caught her in such a way that the

space around her has been set afire. I step away, intending to pick

up the camera to get a picture, but then stop, and decide only

to just be present.

You are not here and today is your birthday. I remember the day, I think

it was in the second grade, that I sat waiting on the front stoop for your

own school bus to arrive, and when it did you ran fast down its stairs

and up the walkway to where I sat, and with wide, frightened eyes you

cried: my friend died yesterday. He was seven, and had only been walking

home, only walking home—I can still hear so clearly that only—and he

just collapsed, and that was that. I remember feeling as we clung together,

and I think you did, too, that this is what made life the scariest thing.

Your birthday. When I was pregnant with you, had just begun to round out

in the belly, my back pulled in to follow as you stretched us both out into

unknown territory, and it was then that I felt the deep foreshadow of this

place where we live now, and so I sat down to write a poem. It was rough,

I was young, only twenty. But it was all you and me, all superhero duo and

scrappy fairy tale. I still believe in that version of us. Maybe just not in quite

the same costumes, now.

When you have made your bed, when you have finished with today's group

and the nurse has watched you take your dose and sent you out into that

unnaturally bright and crowded room, please call. I'll sing.

### Occlusion

I take a swipe at your tight face

pull it back, brush the dustings off—

you were 22 then, your bright smile

gone fallow, your eyes anemic and

retreating.

I pinch the features hard, try by

brute force to bring you back to

your surface, to pull you forward

and out into this very particular,

particular light—

this place I have shaded

by not shading, drawn by

drawing around you,

more screened,

more diffuse, I see now,

than chiaroscuro.

Lisa Beth Fulgham

### After They Sold the Cows, But Before They Cut Away the Pines

Wine-fed and lying in truck beds thrown open,

we had gathered in a field to watch meteor showers

but first noticed the moon, halved

and upward-facing like a bowl to hold

every flinch, every shiver, every _amen_ come Sunday.

Firelight would have drowned out the celestial,

so we grasped at each other for warmth.

We played geography, we played guess-the-headlights,

we played sing-the-tree-line-to-sleep.

We awoke with the warblers at dawn, dew seeped

into the openings of our sleeping bags.

Together, we excavated the remnants of the night.

Blushing and lacking pavement to guide us,

we drove along the barbed-wire fence,

hoping to cross it as we had the night before,

without piercing our skin.

### The Choctaws under the Bed

The picture was boxed in forest green and dust,

waiting to be discovered in the space beneath

my grandmother's brick-hard mattress.

Man and woman, field-worn and dark-skinned,

they glared at me. These two stood upright,

holding their half-filled baskets in front of them.

Behind them grew rows of cotton.

And I wondered, if they could see me,

would they string beads in my straw-like hair?

If they could see me, would they touch

this skin that the sun bites into, chews,

and spits out? Would they scold

me for slouching and step forward

to straighten my spine?

Would they teach me dying

words that would hang in my throat

like phlegm in Southern spring?

Would they say _Oh my, how you've grown,_

_we remember . . ._ or just return to their work,

pulling at the bolls more forcefully?

### Justification

It's ok because I only count

when I'm bored, she says, noticing

every percussive pen click against

legal pad from across the gap

between her and Dr. Drivel.

Behind her back she lifts

and curls her fingers in multiples

of three with each beat.

The inspirational posters and books

with well-worn spines don't distract

enough from the floor tiles, arm freckles

and kaleidoscopes that need to be inventoried.

Just like the asphalt and white

lines of highways are not enough

to keep her from turning her attention

to the passing cars as she paces home.

There is not enough time to number them all,

to make sure that she's seen the correct

amount before she can go inside.

So she takes the longer way, dodging

through alleyways and neighborhoods.

She turns the knob back and forth

three times before heading indoors,

announcing her arrival.

It's ok because at night I can rest,

she says, turning the light off with

the normal click, click, click.

She turns over three times

like an alligator in a death roll

with a dog,

and gives thanks for the dark,

and gives thanks for the dark,

and gives thanks.

### A Strange Offspring

Junior high experimenter,

wisp-banged boy who swabbed

the corners of my locker

while I stood, kicking at a patch

of dried gum on the short, grey carpet,

if then I could have seen the bacteria

swelling in shades of white, green,

and yellow, I wouldn't have volunteered,

raising my hand and wiggling my fingers

under the fluorescent lighting.

Later, we gazed at the Petri dish,

a fertile culture blooming

below us, condensation

lapping the lid.

A girl chortled

two rows over, called me

moldy Mona. You slid

your nails underneath

the tape, opened the container,

and released our spores.

### Found after the Sudden Storm with Straight Line Winds

This light switch, useless.

That half-green, half-rust

lawn chair lost.

Torn bits of yesterday's news:

the school's successful play,

the congressman's unsuccessful affair.

Power lines snaked

across the asphalt.

This pup thrown

against the shed's aluminum side.

This house halved by a pecan tree.

Parking lot puddles reflecting

our cheeks, the sun.

This corn crop's thirst quenched.

These ponds teeming,

this conversation overflowing.

Mary Mills

### The Practical Knowledge of Women

A pragmatist

to all appearances, my father

has spent his life

with steel and fire

but again brings out the little bird

and trusts her to her mate,

her life the size of a wine cork

and fragile as apple blossom.

"He misses her," he explains,

and it is I

with my supposedly impractical education

who can see the mistake.

She spends a week or so

in the larger cage,

sleeping beside him

on a spindly branch

and it convinces my father,

but not me.

It is the practical knowledge of women:

the man who will pluck a feather

will pick your wings bare,

and he who will nearly kill you

will kill you, eventually.

My father believes in love.

So do I, but I also believe

in the bone-cold January days

I spent in an old farmhouse

away from a sharp beak.

I believe in many things

that only look like love

from odd angles, that cannot be

proven beyond any shadows,

but speak the lack.

I believe

in the bare places

where feathers

have never

grown back

### Peas

My mother could make me eat peas,

but not chew them.

I must have swallowed a gallon

whole like medication,

her motives

vitamins dipped in gall.

Later, she could make me tell her

events, but not how I felt.

I'd hold crushes or despair in my mouth

for hours until I could excuse myself

to the cold altar of the bathroom,

offer up the green

flesh of my teenage heart

to an empty room.

Even now, she tiptoes

around perceived scorn,

recoils from the black pits

of old fires

as if the specter of their heat

still frightens her, as if

they might reignite

spontaneously

and swallow her

whole

### Earth from Space

I love best alone,

our apartment

at the bottom of the hill a sunken glow.

There's our life,

I want to say (but don't). We watch the glass door,

waiting to see

ourselves walk by, inside,

astronauts watching Earth from space.

It reminds me of you

last winter, on skates—

how I expected your clumsiness,

but you glided away. How you looked

from the long end of the rink:

oblivious, distant, whole in a way

that crushed my ribs like paper.

I'm never

this close up close, I didn't want to say.

### 30,000

Pushed off

like a swimmer from a pool wall

deep into a cold ripple

of burned pearls.

Our flying dollhouse.

I pretend to read

but how?

the lush whirl of earth, below;

my eyes drag back

like dogs pulling leashes,

resentful of my insistence

on the banal.

my god, I think, listening

for the silence

that coats the world,

but the engines

bored as cattle

lumber on. My open book

tells its story

to the wall.

Monika Cassel

### Waldschatten, Muttersprache

(in memory of Erik Cassel)

The tree is broken in the light.

Every rose folds shut—

Quiet, they say,

like the face of the woman

who looks up from her reflection in the forest pool

to gaze at you, at me, to hear the veery's call.

You asked for dark and light, for here and gone.

The veery's notes resound unseen;

they haven't asked you here

to tender me again with yellow petals.

Marsh marigold, Dutchman's breeches, lady's slipper,

chilled medicines I tucked under your tongue, your tired whisper—

These are the hard coins of our dreams:

fish-breath, rain-slept, heart-kept.

### Thrift, ca. 1946

"Die Fahne Hoch," ("Raise the Flag") co-anthem during the Third Reich, was composed by Horst Wessel, Nazi hero/martyr, and outlawed in Germany after 1945.

She made me a new red dress

when the schools opened again:

pulled the old flag out from a drawer,

clipped the stitches

from the circle in the center, held it up,

shook her head

at the black spider,

"good fabric

and a pity to waste it

but there's just nothing

I can make out of this,"

spread the red rectangle

and cut the pattern;

just enough.

A lot of girls wear red

these days. At recess

boys patrol the playground,

yank up

our skirts. They sing

Horst Wessel's song

as they run by,

"Die Fahne hoch!"

### Hertha Tielsch to Maria Radler,

### Garßen bei Celle, Germany,

### January 1, 1947.

I've enclosed

your handkerchief

which I am returning

to you, unfortunately

still with the stain.

I just laid it in the snow

one more time

to bleach—

Maybe that

will help.

Michael Fleming

### To a Fighter

for Marti

### Invocations

I. CAT Scan

And just what does the cat see

with his shining green eyes

as he skulks through the dark

warm jungle of your veins?

Let him pad silently back

to report that the wet, pulsing

miracle somehow continues.

II. Biopsy

May the surgeon

in her spotless apron

emerge smiling

from the kitchen

saying:

I had a little look

you're not ready

the oven's not

even hot.

III. PET Scan

It sounds so gentle—just a light caress,

nothing intrusive, nothing rude or rough,

just a feathery touch, a lover's kiss,

a whisper barely there, barely enough

but enough all the same—you can't say no.

Or a light knock on your door: open it.

A nice young man, clean as a Mormon, stands

there smiling brightly and asks: How many kittens?

Puppies? Tropical fish? And he hands

you a pamphlet, a rose—you can't say no.

Think of these things when you're in the machine:

the brush of a heron's wing, the soft knock

of knuckles that have never known work, clean

sheets, clean slates, clean blood. And one day we'll talk

of this and laugh, or cry—you can't say no.

### From Dartmouth-Hitchcock

I want to tell you:

they look like they know

what they're doing here.

I want to tell you:

the man we met today,

he'll be a sculptor in reverse—

a poet of perfect excision.

Just the one little pea, no more.

And then we'll go back

to West West, to wood thrushes

and red-eyed vireos and the great

blue herons rising like pterodactyls

from ponds shaded by maples.

Maples—

they know how summer heals

those neatly bored tapholes

from early spring.

I want to tell you:

we wouldn't have a damn

thing different.

### Chemo

By now we know a thing or two about

fire, how it quickens everything alive

or dead or flickering between, and how

to conjure it from nothing, how to give

it what it needs, and no more—just enough

oxygen, just enough life. We love fire,

love to exult in our mastery, love

to amaze ourselves with borrowed power. By

rights we would be gods. But gods, they have their

troubles, too—all that incense, all that dark

insufferable mumbling, all that rain. Why

do we put up with it? We just do. Star-

crossed, marked for the burning at birth. Pain? By

now we know a thing or two about pain.

### Picture This

Do you like a beach? Okay, then, a beach—

in fact, your favorite beach, favorite because

you've never been to this beach before—each

sensation beckons you, opens you, draws

you in, welcomes you to _your_ beach—the sand

envelops the bare contours of your feet,

sunshine pours over you, _here_ , where the land

yields itself to the sea. A waiter greets

you, hands you a glass of exquisite wine,

the taste is an aria, it unfolds

itself in your throat, your belly, the line

between you and universe is gone, golden

light floods through you, heals you, holds

you, whispers everything's going to be fine.

### The Champ

The Champ is down, cold-cocked. Seven. Eight. Nine.

( _two heads faces backlit floating in smoke_

floating in warm wet gauze unending wind

choirs of voices choirs of bells one face broken

one barking numbers the other gone

_the other_ ) The Champ stirs, shakes, slowly rises,

staggers, steadies, blinks hard twice, unfreezes,

nods all-clear. By God, the Champ fights on,

tapping the gloves as if to strike a spark,

as if to pray ( _the other_ ) and the crowd

is delirious, a heaving sea of darkness

and fists, cigars and fedoras, now

rapt, now roaring, now howling like a raw

nerve, electric, as the two of them dance

the dance of circling beasts, now grappling, now glancing

blows, now thunder—by God, the Champ fights on,

unrelenting ( _the other_ ) a quick left,

a right, darting jabs, starting to connect,

at last the Kid is on the ropes, a deft

feint from the Champ, dauntless on the blood-flecked

mat ( _the other_ ), that bed of mortal conflict,

the crowd's madness is love, uppercut,

the Kid's head flies back, rock-a-shock, eyes shut,

nimbus of sweat and blood—the Champ fights on,

by God ( _the other_ ) and the Kid is through.

Carted off. And now the ref does his shtick,

the big-mike announcer does his bit, too,

the crowd trades backslaps and greenbacks. _The fix_

_is on_ , someone mutters gravely. ( _gone_

_never gone_ ) Echoes and laughter, house lights.

Janitors appear, disappear. The night

is over—and by God, the Champ fights on.

Daniel Stewart

### January

I defy you this year with a smile

less one tooth

extracted because the bone

that anchored it

dissolved. Neglect born

of neglect. A mother loves one

son but not the other. A goose will kill

its smallest, lamest mouth

for the sake of other hungers.

We endure

inversion-gummed air, The Gap

and I, ignore

side streets rutted with snow

marbled like foam on a latte.

More than halfway through

my forties I know

better, January. If the boss I'd fire

your ice; shove your single digits up your

aurora borealis. I heart you

like a clogged artery, stroke you

like a pulse-burst. You've struck the sky

of birds, strung the smog

with tinsel. The frost-fringed dead

limbs of the trees fool the kids

but I'm lost

as the starlings. Such garish

garnish crowns you the grandest, damnedest

widow. You suck

me dry. My hands crack

and flake. My lips need

a balm. A stranger reached

into me and wrenched

out a tooth. He numbed me

first—I felt nothing—but the cracking

was like ice fallen through.

I've fallen through you,

January. Your frozen fist will wreck a face.

I turn my cheek for you to kiss.

### April

The white top reanimates, little stranglers

haloed with petals. I thought I killed

them all last year with poison, with my bare

hands dragging them out of the graves

they were digging in the lawn. Weeds

always return. You never

will. The neighbors started gardens but I've been

wary, haven't even tilled the weedy soil. Dandelions

roar neon wounds. Wind riots

in the budding plum, the frantic

blossoms your absence. Sky an ache

of angles through awkward branches. The poppies

under fatten and stir.

Bent, I spray white top and crabgrass; crush

cheat; I resist. You insist

the sky's schizophrenic with clouds. The sky

pales the way a face

drains. The wind's scouring tears

eyes (a reflex) that reflect only the ordinary

light. Mid-April, and frost expected after midnight.

### Corvette

As if Cancer was a giant

vampire that broke off the blackened

fang it sucked the blood

from my family with & left

it in the flesh to fester.

The white

skeleton stretched grey

skin into a yellowed

grin, waved its claw

like a magician

performing a trick.

Stripes

our Brindle/Pit mix

whined and sniffed a chrome

wheel, lifted leg to piss

but found Dad's foot & curse

up his ass instead.

My brother

hooted & drooled, lusted

over the two-seater trap.

Never good at math, Dad:

We were four, not counting

the dog.

_Splinter,_ I thought. _Stab._ Then:

Dick.

Told my brother he could pull it out

of the garage. Turned to me

_O meat of him, grey-tinged pink with rotting,_ said:

You get to wash it.

### Midnighting

I like to do it while I'm drunk.

I like to do it when I'm starved.

Slick out under a fat

moon dressed in black,

even the shoes.

Some nights call

for hooves to clatter

through quelled neighborhoods

(The sleeping flinch

while dreaming),

others stripped

naked as a wish

to be helpless, to be

holy.

Others, lonely.

Or, fashion paws

from cat hair and nail parings

to match the mask

filched from the raccoon

hunkered under

the shed—paws

ideal

for scrambling

up streetlights—now

varmint stupid

for starlight—pale

as a secret

no one burns to know,

breath molecular

chaos I marry

to wind and go.

17th

August you give me a canker

my periodontalist wants to biopsy

you send me flailing into rush hour

you ding my fender

you unfriend me

you terrorize my mother out of language

you berate her with dialysis

you castigate her with leukemia

you accuse us with fires

you plaque the valley in smoke

you cast deformed shadows

you bully us into prayer

Are you prone to canker sores

You have a history

of smoking (sinning)

Do you suck hard candy

Do you suck anything

What about cinnamon

what about turmeric coriander why

is curry so expensive

what about lemons

what about _getting darker instead of dusk_

What about Egypt Iraq Iran Syria

Our lust

for quinoa

disempowers Bolivians

On the Internet

I saw a man eat another man's heart

I saw a man immolate himself

You unveil the olinguito

then beach hundreds of dolphins

Thunder after midnight explodes

me from dream

shudders the windows

catapults the cats

casts serpents seething

through the barren plum tree

the shriveled raspberry

a respite

August

your hard hot rain

on my wet hapless face

John Glowney

### Cigarettes

What was cool

was when an older boy snuck

a girlie magazine

out of Ross' Five & Dime

inside his shirt.

No one knew girls like this

in slips and filigreed bras

with their compromised thighs

and their bared knees,

incongruous and lovely.

What was cool

was Bill the mechanic

at Schmitty's Garage

with the cottony white

of a Lucky Strike

between two greasy black fingers

and the time someone jacked a pack

and we watched him smoke

back of the little league field

where the local bikers

popped wheelies and burned rubber

and he hacked and hacked

because he said

he liked it.

What was cool

was the chopped Harley

we swore we'd take across the country

the summer

after graduating from laying back on our beds

with our secret urges

and our evolving plans

and our mystical trances

and our detailed seduction

of the prettiest senior cheerleader

who willingly unbuttoned her blouse

gracefully as rain outside the upstairs window

and our copies of _True Detective_ under the mattress,

the models' eyes blocked

with a black rectangle

so they wouldn't have to see

what we were about to do

as we lit up and lay there

revving our engines

in the glow and the ash and the smoke rings of ourselves.

### Boys

A full nelson or Indian burn, jiu-jitsu

or the flying drop kick,

we smacked each other around in the parking lot

after Sunday School.

We caught the tomcats by their stringy tails

and swung them,

we peppered the granary eaves with bb shots

killing replaceable sparrows.

Slick green frogs, and mottled brown toads

that peed in our sticky hands,

we marooned in old washtubs

until they curled up like old shoes.

We pinched any girl we liked.

The slow boys, the boys who couldn't throw,

we shoved into their lockers.

The substitute teachers, especially the one

with the lazy eye, weathered our snickers

and spitballs. We taunted

our retarded classmate until scolded,

unashamed, the wild green pulse

of our short attention spans

fizzing in the sugary glitter

of what comes next.

And when, in the delivery room,

our first-born arrives,

howling, a boy,

we sit there and blubber

like _big old crybabies_.

### Paradise of Wounds

I'd have done anything in those days.

Cut off my ear. Smashed

my red convertible

through the mayor's front window.

Played strip-poker with the nuns

under the table. I had no quarrel

with the universal laws of nature

or other local customs

but I ostentatiously rejected

the Pythagorean Theorem

and flouted gravity

by floating over the bright raft

of the tennis courts at night.

I've crawled under the bed sheets

of their hourly-rate motels

like an amorous cockroach,

I've waited at their bus stops

to taste the sublimities of cocaine,

the narcotic joys

they kept in coat pockets,

I've been jonesing

for their hammer and nail

sex, I've hung out with them

in our jail cell, our belts

around our necks.

I've shared the clear cold vision

of the damned,

who have seen the fruits

of their pleasures

and delights sour,

whose heads are the stinging jellyfish mothers

of a thousand motives.

### At The Museum of Don't Come Back

Memory's a stranger in a diner

eating the blue plate special,

rubbing one hairy ear with a spoon.

Don't look back the way a train

leaves the station and the countryside

shrinks, the tiny red barns

glowing in warm yellow light. I've

been riding with the crop-duster,

out-dated county map in hand,

wheel and dive, wind bucking the struts,

following my instincts into the cross-hatch

of fence-rows,

the drift of forgetfulness under telephone lines

poisonous beyond the fields' lush edges.

Each time it's like visiting a museum,

the early years taming this mid-west

glacial till. Scythes. Old threshing machines.

Frost on all the exhibits. Some kind

of raw rust on the plough-blades.

What I have laid aside extends for miles.

### Sunday Morning

And the gray in the sky today is nothing

that a fresh coat of paint

and some flowers wouldn't fix. Violets, fuchsia

arranged in the cloud-beds,

some wanton tulips,

and the wind blowsy in the trees

cluttering the air with the smell of fresh mown grass

and gasoline

and sparrows

like the change in your trousers

scattered on a bare patch of sidewalk.

And the sun, roused like a king

who demands all attention, then sleeps

like a baby as the party carries on.

No politics, just a silence

so clear you thought

you could sing it, or somebody could,

some gorgeous voice in the scuffed static,

the needle stuck in the groove.

Hannah Callahan

### The Ptarmigan Suite

1.

When I first flew south

I was brown with white wings

And I lived above the timberline.

In winter, white with black tails,

I frequented the tundra,

Quiet farms, yards, and barren hills

And loved willow scrub the best.

If you'd sat down in a sheltered valley

I might have called to you

As I did in those days,

A deep and raucous holler

Had I pebbles in my voice box:

Go-out! Go-out!

Go-back!

Go-back!

2.

The first time I pore over _A Field Guide to the Birds_

I obsess over the ptarmigan, willow and rock. Why,

Here's a sort of grouse shaped like a horn of plenty,

Unremarkable; once I was described as a plain Jane;

Stout, brown, pigeon-like, but lacking what it takes to live in density

And it makes the sound of a soul leading a body toward fire.

3.

Chimney Swift

Whippoorwill

Some birds look like sails when they fly

Or sound like harps when they sing

And the myth I've heard is that the Devil

Is where the birds sing through the night,

In winter white, off a quiet hill

Eclipsed by the willow scrub.

I've heard a big, big ghost

Is who shelters the sheltered valleys.

Truthfully, I'm not for superstition

But if you could change colors,

Could leave when it snowed, could

Fly off the moment you were scared,

There would be a name in the ether

For you.

4.

Despite the ways each bird in Heaven is superior to me

Only I step this far back when needing to look.

As for now, we've all gone: shot, caged, or eaten.

We sit around trying to arrive collectively at something real,

Something about what it meant to live as birds.

One bird says _This is what the wind felt like_ ,

One says _This is what it felt like for the wind to blow_ ,

One even says _Here's a sensation similar to the wind_.

But the ptarmigan, the under-bird, the ground-feeder,

The last one being carried off in the teeth of a fox,

Says _Me,_ _I can still feel the wind_.

_I can go-back and feel it_.

5.

Some nights this winter a great-horned owl was wont to perch outside my bedroom window.

I'd never once see him. But his call, working like boiling water over the ice-thick air,

Caused me several times to think he was right beside me in bed.

The Great-Horned Owl: As large as our largest hawks, and fierce-looking.

So much fiercer than my ptarmigan bird, nights he hooted to me through the glass,

I imagined him sky-stalking, with preternatural foresight, so that the motion of the stars

To him, was as jewels scattering across a floor.

Untrue, but the image struck me nevertheless, because I was smaller than he was.

Because he could see me through the dark, and often told me so.

Lee Kisling

### How the Music Came to My Father

Sort of a miracle, you might say because

I never saw or heard him practice. Just one day

there he was playing an accordion in his baggy pants

and white shirt looking like he was holding two bags

of potatoes, squeezing the air in and out of them.

The miracle of it—so sudden and unexpected—I now

picture God reaching down his wavering finger to touch

some other man with musical sensibilities, some father

two doors down, but accidentally touching Glenn.

And there he was, blessed, in our crackerbox house,

playing some nickering old-world polka and a passed-over

father down the street pulled his belt from his pants

and went looking for his boys.

The cosmic error was corrected eventually by

whoever it is that fixes God's mistakes. We went back

to our yelling and the whippings and the accidental

Myron Floren moment passed. The world I knew

made sense again, and the holy finger must have

only barely brushed against him—he never said this

is going to hurt me more than it hurts you. And now

he's in a sort of band of accidental squeeze box angels

on 42nd Street in heaven and there is a champagne bubble

machine, and sometimes they go marching in their old

army uniforms down that gold paved road,

shaking with palsy, tickling the ivories,

singing _Leaning on the Everlasting Arms._

### Kindly Give Up

Kindly give up these seats for the elderly and the daft,

arthritic abuelos singing pharmacy songs.

Kindly give them up.

Where they have been you are going.

Where they are going you are also going.

Give them directions, not to there-

they will find there easy enough, soon enough,

to where else they are headed before there

with always bags of stuff on the bus.

Kindly give them your seats

your help, your hand, your memory.

Eyes magnified by thickening lenses, leopard spotted.

Less admired certainties, less effective remedies.

Less likely recoveries, less remembered memories.

Like strollered babies eying their peers,

they watch each other disappear.

Landmarks of long lives, having passed by here before,

creased old maps, now everything's changed,

what with the by-pass and one-way streets to the shiny

spotless hospital on the hill where

Once upon a time

cows stood.

What is most depressing about cemeteries is the heavy yellow

machinery—once just a couple of bums with shovels

lowering themselves, making it last.

Please give up thinking of their movement as mass transit.

Picked-up pilgrims along the road, slowly boarded,

carried to clinics, casinos and churchyards,

deposited on corners. Speak to them

in Polish, Spanish, or Serbo-Croat.

Nod in understanding,

yes, yes.

Babies once, transported in arms, never alone,

tiny fingers, pink toes wee wee allthewayhome,

soothed, sheltered, spanked, adored. Kindly make

a place for them, give up your seats, soon

the return, to the corner of

Here & Gone, en memoriam, the gray

guests of honor.

### Borrowings

Here is the imaginary library

where you can borrow a father—a book

you didn't finish. Old books about fathers

and grandfathers with brittle pages,

pictures and maps of Kansas and Iowa

may show signs of wear. They are anecdotal—

the price of a horse, the hot weather in September.

Here, the reading room.

Empty chairs and morning sun

slanting through the windows,

the slow quiet turning of pages. Shhhh.

No howl here—no keening, no Shall We Gather,

but someone has written these books because

someone needs to read them.

I will be your father if you'll be my daughter.

a loaner to get you around the town;

oh what a family we could be—

understudies, bound to say

sorry, I loved you,

and goodbye.

### Write 50 Times

(for Dave Moses)

1. I will not chew gum in class. I will

2. not chew gum in class. I will

3. not gum in class chew. I will

4. in class chew not gum. I will

5. not sing The Marseillaise in class.

6. I will not, just incidentally, ever work for the telephone company.

7. And I will NEVER put my hand in my shirt like Napoleon Bonaparte.

7. Well yes, I suppose it all started with the gum chewing.

8. And some things just happen, of course.

9. I will remain gum-free, attentive, and responsible,

9a. but possibly not in class.

10. I will not chew gum at my Uncle Inor's funeral.

11. Tomorrow afternoon at 2 pm. Thanks for asking.

12. I will not chew more than one stick of gum in class.

13. I will not, as a rule, respond well to petty discipline in class.

14. I mean, who the hell really cares about gum chewing?

15. With all due respect.

16. Or bloody prime numbers. Or King Whatsit. Or wretched poems.

19. Like going to school ever did you any good.

22. Bongo the Clown probably makes more money than you

29. and he drives a red Camaro.

34. Christopher Columbus chewed gum and he discovered Virginia or someplace.

37. Actually, chewing gum is a sedative.

38. It helps me concentrate.

39. It's a health issue really—I could get a prescription.

41. You don't want to see me when I haven't had a chew for a few hours.

43. Thousands of people work in the chewing gum industry.

44. Good decent Americans with mortgages and car payments.

45. Next I suppose we won't be permitted to sleep in class.

46. What's this class about, anyway?

48. We the People demand to have the right to chew gum!

49. Give me liberty or give me some gum!

50. E chewibus pluribus gumbus!

Jose A. Alcantara

### Finding the God Particle

When we are finally standing face to face

and flesh to flesh, remind me that I want

more than your body, more than your mind.

Remind me that I want the infinite sweep of you

the full onrushing charge of you

the m-c-squared of you, the big bang of you.

Remind me to give you the indivisible parts of me

the strange quarks of me, the charm of me

the up and down of me.

And though 95% of everything else is darkness

let us be nothing but a tangle of vibrating strings

caught in the claws of a curious cat.

### Alone

I fell asleep by the river again.

Thirty-eight degrees. _The Stranger_

in my lap. How is it that the same sun

that gives this sweet lethargy

brings another man to murder?

A single shot, a pause, then four more.

As I watch the ducks drop into the eddies

I know the sun is not to blame, nor the moon,

the fires, the droughts, or the surging tides.

We act. We do what we want.

Sometimes we get away with it.

Sometimes we pay a price.

### A Day in the Life

It's her birthday.

She opens a tiny black box

bound in a blue bow.

A billion billion stars tumble out

some yellow, some red

some big, some small.

They fall, in all directions

into a bottomless black bowl

where they burn burn burn

until she makes a wish

and with her cold breath

blows them out.

David A. Bart

### Veteran's Park

I walked there at daybreak

to view the colossal bronze

of a young ensign, bereft, his rifle

capped with another's helmet.

May thirty-first. This was once

observed as Decoration Day

but today there are no starry pennants

or tri-colored sashes pinned across

men and women who rise from folding

chairs to gingerly salute. This place is empty,

almost. A teenager is learning to drive.

Sparrows make their ablutions in the sand.

And there. My dead father, standing away,

teeth and glasses restored since I saw him last.

But it's someone else, of course,

some other elder serviceman

yet to be taken Over There.

Bicycle parts and a broken cement

culvert lay in the creek—mortar and caisson.

Struck by its lanyard, a flag pole is ringing.

Somewhere a lawnmower idles—

my father's song—the droning made dulcet

by distance and wind and how I like to imagine

it is the sound made by the morning star.

### This Week

Our daughter lost her incisor.

It rattled in the plastic bite-size

treasure chest her school supplies.

Baptists examine their thirty

foot steeple taken down

for repair. It rests on its side

across the parking lot.

Instead of sleeping on it

she buried her tooth in the yard.

Soiled fingernails, a red gap

between thorn canines,

like a novice vampire

interring a fang.

Without its mitre, the house

of God resembles any other

middle class dwelling.

On the church roof, spotlights

hit a white spire of moths.

My wife found only sleeping hands

tucked under the pillow.

Regardless, the tooth fairy left a dollar.

After work I drive

past the church.

Sideways, the steeple

points the way home.

### The Game

The drill team built a half-time prop,

some sort of rickety fuselage parked

in front of _Wildcats_ spelled with Solo

cups pushed into chain link fence.

Wind carries the clatter of drum practice

across the street to this coffee house

buzzing with after-school girls.

A petite scholar pouts for a boy on her laptop,

hands cupping her au lait, taking the brew

like a philter. Bedheads peruse an art book

trying hard to be unimpressed by 1000 nudes.

When an unfamiliar classmate enters

they turn but pretend they don't see her,

even though they are dying to be noticed.

There is a father sitting with his very little girl

who's eager to greet them all but it's time

to leave for the game. As he helps put on her coat

he recites, with each button, an oracle

assuring his daughter that every closure

will bring something unexpected and new:

a gift

a ghost

a friend

a foe

a letter to come

a journey to go

### Green Ghost

Her hand made spontaneous scribble

of things to come. On the grocery list

our grandmother wrote _no not him_

_not the one._ Moments later Oswald

shot the president.

She miscarried seven times.

She claimed their spirits awoke

and could be heard after dark.

At dusk she smelled cigarettes,

said the revenant of a smoking paramour

had come to her kitchen window.

She once pursued a sad infatuation

to Mexico, returned with a photo

of the catholic priest and a devil mask

she hung above her bed.

She put grandchildren in the guest bed

to sleep but we stayed awake to play

the board game stored underneath.

The glowing phantom spinner pointed

its finger at whoever had a turn but

we never learned to play. We just watched

Green Ghost spin phosphorescent

then jumped into bed before our grandmother

looked in, dabbing her red-rimmed eyes,

muttering about missing pieces,

the lack of rules and small voices

in the night.

### December 13th

She wears a pair of pink strap-on

marabou wings and whatever she's staring at

is something most of us hope we never see.

I recognize her from Cora street's wildflower

median. She knelt there for days last summer

and announced _Do Not Mow_ —

repeating the posted phrase as if to teach

a bird to talk. She looks like she grew up

from a fifth grade classmate I remember,

one who skipped cracks to save her mothers

back, a girl with boy's glasses and breasts

too soon. Shoppers skirt the sidewalk

where she stands this evening in a stained

white formal, a store window at her back

as if she's part of the display. Her perpetual grin

reminds me why mannequin smiles show no teeth.

This displaced bridesmaid shuffles into the street

where her damp hair gleams red with Christmas light

and she becomes someone else. A serene ingenue,

ecstatic in her ordeal—Saint Lucy, unaware

she has been crowned and the crown is fire.

Greg Grummer

### War Reportage

The war began about six feet from victory

and crawled there over the eyes of a child.

In the beginning soldiers walked up the road,

never minding that as they did so the road got them

pregnant with map in their own private Gethsemane.

Then a mother, crucified on coming unwantedness,

bled son from the poem nailed into her trees.

Therefore, one by one, the Europes came to explain themselves.

After that we hoisted up crows and made love in stones.

Satan picked up the throat of the town

and drank from it until there was no more sleep.

The town died then woke up again because of its smell.

"That's when Satan returned, sir,

and ate what happened in the field."

But here in the camera one can see

where bleeding and bleeding, and where "so on."

One can see where two men revenged themselves on a dog,

where a moiety revenged itself on a people, and where a ditch

revenged itself on a shovel by spitting up church.

But then you knew all that, from the gap

between fingers and from the distance between wolves.

You knew it, but you forgot it somehow.

### The Night Before the Battle in Which I'm Killed

Someday it won't be moonlight

coming down to this field

but it will be the actual moon.

The moon will fill the land with its priests,

igniting ditches and water

buffalo with desperate passions.

Trees will strain with the hatefulness of the moon,

snapping under its high tiredness.

The moon's pilgrimage down to this field

will split the brains of crows and carp

will die with that kind of light in their eyes.

Someday the moon will present itself,

along with its card, as the last actor of grief

in this waiting room of bones and milk.

The world's infantry will be as surprised

to be visited by the moon as pigs entered by demons

and driven off a cliff.

The moon, pushing us into the earth

like a baby's thumb

pushing a strawberry into the mud.

### Wounded in the Black Forest

Over there, by the X, is the place I was hit.

I was cut down in the dusk by an absence of face

in the midst of this forest of Hansel and Hitler,

this forest of make and believe.

I think you've guessed by now

that my human strategy was saddened by truth,

my forehead used as a plow.

My company found me minutes later, clothes

emptied, entered by rain.

They found me and took me straight to a grotto,

where landed snow made it seem like the end of the century.

There they left me to turn into a priest.

And that's how I ended up here at this midnight

surgery being stepped on by swans.

### Returning Home on Sick Leave

I, who emigrate, walk

in on the rampage of the library.

The windows have been emptied.

In any one corner there's very little room.

Books torment.

Above desire, a globe burns with rhyme.

Is anybody home, there on the stairs

where the dogs . . . ?

The estate is missing, taken

on the road where it bleeds.

Home, where spouses, abundant, surge,

and where kiss gathers in its sheets and tatters.

Home, where the breast and its shepherd,

a hand, fly like rice before the coming bride.

Is anybody home?

I doubt it, with a whip in the thorax,

while the bones breathe.

"Hello?" hangs there in birds.

Eventually, I look into

my own face again, and touch

on the fat of "place."

### The Meaning of War

I was at a party when someone asked "What is the meaning of war?" I was about to answer when someone else said "Hey, what the hell do you know about war? Were you ever a soldier?"

Well, let me say this: I've traveled with a skull and I've drunk its water. After a long and brutal firefight I've stumbled out of my barracks, well a-fter dark, and dropped to the ground, sick from the earth's rotation, and there held onto the grass as if holding someone's hair. And let me ask you this: Isn't one a soldier who has slept with soldiers and woken up like that, eyes raw with smoke, but not the smoke from wood or leaves?

I've participated in the wars of the church and in the militarisms of fame and shallow hope. Just by taking a look at my fist you'd know that I know how a soldier feels after fighting with luxury.

(If you had the time I could explain what it feels like to go to war pregnant and then come back a spirit. The only thing rendering you visible? Survivor's guilt smeared on the lips.)

My information would indicate to you what if feels like to darken after years and how to stumble beneath a pile of graves under water.

I can't tell you the meaning of war because it's an impression left on our flesh like fire impressed on a guitar in the form of dried wax. The meaning of war can't be said but can be eaten like dust from the basement of a church; and it can't be told but only heard, like past-sounds traveling through us at the speed of regret; and it can't be confessed but must be held, like a tattoo of a heart blazoned onto a heart; and it smells like that most violent of all human emotions—fresh air.

But of course that doesn't explain the meaning of war, which is why, after the party, I go home, then into my son's room and take him, crying, out of his crib, and put his bare flesh against mine because he's strong and we're both upset. Then I sing, not a song, because my singing is awful, but a death chant; I do this because although it's morning it's only 3:00 in the morning and he's hungry and would like nothing better than to sleep, and my death chant can help him enter the land of visions it will be hard to remember upon waking, and that, more than anything, is the meaning of war.

Rande Mack

### rat

in the old days when the music mattered more

than the mold on his cheese or the vintage of his

swill this man danced circles around his appetite

he was conceived on a oak pew in a choir loft

he was abandoned the day the plague arrived

his mother's reasons were too raw to consider

he swept her final kiss under a rug in his heart

his dreams turned into tunnels silent and twisted

he circled the moon stamped on a miner's map

he staked his claim on flood ravaged hearts

he glued mirrors to the toes of his boots and

waded through laundromats looking for love

the people he calls friends are like old shirts

stolen from lines in backyards without fences

he finds the more they fade the better they fit

he enjoys irrigating his neighbors' contempt

he leaves tracks across pieces of their minds

this man's shadow might pick his own pocket

### rabbit

this man wishes the music wasn't so jagged

in his dreams the music is always dripping

drops of acoustic candy that nourish his delight

he dips his thumb in the wine and twirls his 'stash

he pulls on his big ear as he surveys the salad bar

he fingers the sudden hole in his empty pocket

his impeccable shadow ambushes his swagger

he samples a crouton before turning away

over his shoulder the silence grows louder

all the wrong strangers inspect his surprise

he feels like god might be squeezing his aorta

he feels like rubbing noses with the waitress

he is a son of a tenth generation heartbreaker

he has an alphabet's worth of brothers and sisters

his mother's carrot cake still makes men tremble

this man slips out the door into the arms of a new moon

he wakes up in a bed of roses but ends up yet again

in a mirror tending the scratches carved by thorns

### wolverine

this man is a master at making time

every sundown he matches wits with regret

too long in one place plays hell with his shadow

his foot prints are craters filling with snow

his heart is a canyon with caves on the walls

sooner or later he'll climb through them all

this man likes his elbow room frigid and vast

he likes his music empty of all but the beat

he unbuckles his belt when he sits down to eat

curiosity is an avalanche that overwhelms him

he gargles gin and broken glass to sharpen his smile

his big jaws chew on the words before he speaks

before he woos a woman with bones in her belly

and silence in her eyes and white painted teeth

another jazz angel on another moonlit street

in his dreams his lovers become mirrors where

he finds his children with names he can't remember

a turbulent murmur shudders his sleep

### snake

this man's heart is smaller than a chokecherry

mercy never rattles the locks on his thoughts

he grins as he dreams another man's dreams

he goes days without eating teasing desire

imagining the flavors of his favorite soufflé

he is a connoisseur with dirt under his nails

this man peddles fruit from the family tree

his mother sits nearby in rusty moonlight mirror in

hand plucking silver hairs sticking out her tongue

this man's past is wrapped around a rhythm

he loves to bob his head and shake his tail

and bend every ear up and down church street

he whispers as he stretches the truth

listen closely to the parable of his want

hear the silence he carves when he moves

this man heats his shanty with shadows

he beats his rugs and sheds his skin before

the dew on his lawn turns to blood and freezes

J. K. Kitchen

### Anger Kills Himself

I wanted to nap one afternoon.

Another row next door, I thought,

though the sound was so regular

when you woke me to listen.

We heard one long scream

followed by one long pause,

then another scream, same pitch,

and another pause, same length.

By the time I got up,

you had already crossed the alley

to find the cry and your neighbor,

cord circling his neck,

hanging on a branch of Dutch Elm,

the most beautiful tree for blocks.

His wife was still keeping the time

of stare, scream and head in hands

when the ambulance came.

That was ages ago.

But last night I heard them again,

only _he_ was the one screaming,

and it was constant until all air left him.

Out of the sudden quiet her whisper told me

she should have combed her hair;

then he wouldn't have gotten so mad.

Late in the morning

the lady from the dry-cleaners returned my call,

said my shirt's pattern of crimson flowers

was already faded when I dropped it off.

I hung up and walked the seven blocks

to call her a liar. Enveloped in my yelling,

her thin cheeks had the clear sheen

of a crimped garment bag

when she lost her breath.

Then I myself could hardly breathe.

Our end will come in a picture-perfect, strutting blast of rage.

A postcard you sent from France years ago

still hangs on the fridge.

Most days I hardly notice it:

a burly man carved on a capital

in the choir of Notre-Dame-du-Port.

Crouching demons drape his shoulders,

their scaly arms choke his swelling biceps.

His whole body is smooth.

With thick long legs and a wide muscular torso,

only his soul would be light enough

to hurl into hell. His deep mouth gulps air.

His eyes are stretched. Above them,

two full waves of hair move in a stone flow

past his blown cheeks. His long sword,

its hilt gripped with both hands,

rises straight from the waist,

edges between hard breasts,

then points to his throat—

all power about to be spent.

To me he looks about as Romanesque

as a dimpled lifeguard:

athletic, handsome, mythical;

a kind of Saint George who could

slay Satan's minions, or die trying.

Such chiseled vice might pass for virtue.

Perhaps the medieval sculptor gave

this Anger too flattering a personification.

I imagine someone must have noticed

the Sin's lovely allure in proud relief—

a cleric once robbed of church plate

or a respected widow raped in youth;

someone who had suffered a knight's rage

or a husband's fist, who would have known

that such crafted beauty, so hard to resist,

demanded a deadly caption to warn us of stabbing fury,

how ruin follows the one unleashing it.

So at the top there is this: _Ira se occidit._

### Daydreams of California and a Phone Call

1

When February's snow thickens and clumps,

the Berkeley Marina

is where tugging nostalgia

takes me to see kites,

some the size of giant centipedes,

others the shape of pre-historic birds;

their faces are totems and their flyers

take the name, sometimes even appearance,

of each floating animal, "the flag of a clan."

In fact

the little round clouds here

remind me of Durkheim's baldness,

the way it balloons over the blue border

on the cover of _Elementary Forms_.

I imagine him, with his glasses

pointed gently downward,

as a French rabbi

on an armchair that hangs in the sky.

A cloud among clouds

he observes and at last shares in

the rest of a nebulous Sabbath.

To the lighthearted sociologist

kites might resemble

impaired _churingas_

in slow and fluttered motion.

And in those parts of the air

where faces of reptiles

hover neck and neck

the wind makes quiet sounds

of slurred and whistled breaths.

The kited Marina,

imagined from the distance of a far-away winter,

is the measure of my dreams.

2

And my brother is always there

at the hollowed-out bottom

of a hill, his deck shoes

planted before the tide's sandy arc.

His line stretches the highest.

It is attached to the sun.

The light he tethers

gives each saurian form

its airy iridescence.

Strands of his thick fire-and-ash hair

rise and fall with the gusts.

He needs me to take hold of the orange reel,

to free his fingers from the strain of the twine.

And I want to. And I do.

He feels for changes

in the breeze

as he walks and smokes.

I tug at the gentle glare.

Glancing back I see

his body blending into the bay,

his shirt filling with a squall,

his steps going

closer to the docks,

away from the knoll.

Gaunt and miniature

in the distance he waves to me.

His cupped and damaged hand,

afloat in the cigarette's fog,

points to a striped spinnaker

about to fly off the bow of a puffed yawl.

When we get home

we'll ask Mom

for cookies and cognac.

3

Beneath the kitchen lamp, eyes closed again,

I see that beautiful black roundness of a seal's head.

It glistens and bobs, as the weaving streams

of the kites' blissful tails twist beside the water.

My eyes open. Back in white Edmonton

I am still handling garlic, mayonnaise and oil

mixed in a mustard jar, with the lie of a shaky simile

riveting me to the wintery place I'm desperate to leave:

no matter what, scattered walnuts _won't_ _ever_

settle on top of lettuce like boats anchored in seaweed.

Conflated memories make better dreams.

My garlic, the milky package reads, comes from Gilroy,

that spot I visited once as a boy craving to smell what was raw.

Again to the shore of home I drift. The webbed feet

of a white albatross grip the top of a bulb-shaped buoy.

My eyes stay shut until the buzz of a phone.

4

Mother is calling to say I have jury duty

in Martinez: yet another oil town,

wet and windy and oceanless.

On the edge of a strait that looks

as hard as a shellacked box,

this county seat of Contra Costa

toils under the hot glint of refinery tanks.

The moiling waterway of Martinez

is as much a coffin to me

as the grim river that halves the city of Edmonton,

where the air dries out once the flow freezes.

5

The Californian official who sent home the letter

of my summons refuses to accept

her argument that my living in Canada

exempts me from judging those of my native land.

I tried to explain to the man . . . .

This praying mother's protests rarely matter

by the time the special intentions of her lost ones

have inched their way along her rosary's shivering beads.

Sorrowful mysteries, they can no longer plead for themselves.

Sleepless unto death, they are sentenced to the hard time

of eyes and testimony they can hardly close.

6

Changing the subject, she asked me

if I remembered (hell-bent-on-discipline)

Sister Monserat, my fifth-grade teacher.

She left her order years ago, distraught,

I was told, and then moved to a neighborhood

where hanging flowerpots line the streets,

somewhere—Mom forgot exactly—on the Marin side of the bridge.

Apparently, she had a pretty place.

From her view she could see sailboats

in their berths and windsurfers near the cove

where Donny, my brother, went to sleep

on water. Like a kite let go of,

he floated away on the same fogless morning

her usual fast-paced walk across the Gate

was cut short.

For all we know the former nun

closed her eyes before the parting splash,

rose numb to the surface of a green swell,

blew out from her belly his pieces of swallowed ash

then rolled her wailing body back into the sea.

Jim Pascual Agustin

### The Man Who Wished He Was Lego

His hands would be yellow

and forever curved

into a semi-square "C."

Designed only for quick

and easy snapping

of pieces meant

to fit. His shoes

would be the same color

as his pants with no zips

or buttons, no pockets

for slipping in notes

that could be shredded

in the wash. He would need

not worry about the shape

of his head, or haircuts

and thoughts for that matter.

And best of all, his chest

would be stiff and hollow,

far too small

for a heart.

### Do Millipedes Bleed?

The bathroom sink reflects

a clinical glare

from the white light bulb.

Close to my toothbrush,

a dark shape

thicker than a string,

curved upward at one end.

My hand quickly tries

to reach for something,

a comb, a slipper,

anything to flick it away,

perhaps crush it.

Then up close I see

it is hunched over

a drop of water,

drinking. Tiny feelers

waving back and forth

in a gentle rhythm,

minute legs, thin

as the hair between

my knuckles,

quivering.

### The Photograph

Stripped of leaves from the planet's change

of angle (scientific calculations can predict

the end of such a cycle), the limbs of this tree

appear no more than frail, black streaks

against the grey sky. But for the birds.

With folded wings they have chosen to adorn

the branches. It is not the first tree

to be so starkly dressed. A friend on the other side

of the world shared a photograph that looked

nearly the same as what is now before

my window. Echoes of the same rhythm,

only composition and lighting differ.

The image remains longer in the retina, a memory

reinforced, perhaps more intensely remembered?

Would any photograph chanced upon,

then lingered over, become just as embedded

in the mind? That it, too, burns? Here, with the click

of a mouse, I browse: a photograph of two soldiers.

One on the ground, the other holding a rifle.

Afghanistan's range of mountains never looked

so violated. The grass that clings to the jagged

surface appears dry, dead. The colour of the soldiers'

clothes, like soil before rain. Both of them wear green

vests, for bullets and provisions. The one with a knee

close to the ground where the other lies

is smiling. The lifeless one has thicker beard

and no helmet, his shadow touches the sling

of the other's rifle. I first saw them on my old laptop

screen three years ago. I see them again

on another machine, just as frozen.

### Science Fiction 1

"Yes, please," her last words. Ears

waiting for the flick of the switch.

The thick glass plate between her

and the man she trusts won't allow more

than a dim red glow. Chamber of recycled

truck container. Crusts of rust on the stretcher

stolen from an abandoned clinic. Energy

saving lightbulbs with darkened tubes

like fingers burnt in a power outlet.

In a split second she will no longer remember

a loved one's last embrace. That is her hope.

Throb on her temple, beating

of a moth. What comes next

is always a surprise even for the man

who has done this too many times.

### Recycled Chandelier Tales

"Trust me, I'm telling you a story."

—Jeanette Winterson, The Passion

1

Held up by spiderwebs

more than an iron ring clasped

to the ceiling, I burn

with the last lightbulb

that may bring an end to this.

All past existences

down to ash and rubble.

2

I was a trinket in a box

for the emperor's twenty-seventh

concubine. I had three eyes

of rubies and a diamond.

I felt the grip

once of love, then no more

than lust. Until the people came

to set me free, so many voices,

so many feet soiling the chamber floor.

3

Dreams always end in darkness

from where they came.

My skin was not always white

or tinged with rust. I was red

with the blood of infidels.

Then of believers. Then of my master's.

I used to cut the wind,

sing as it gasped in pain.

I remember petals coming down,

and thorns. Always something sharp

along with the touch of velvet.

4

I am electric. An abomination.

Spiders weave more stories

than I can remember. They taunt me

with their clumsy legs, their non-geometric

traps that catch nothing

but dust. They obscure

my view of a painting that was hung

for me to illuminate. Someone

spare me this existence. Crush

the last lightbulb and stab

a candle in its place.

I was meant for grandeur.

Not for this. Not this.

Jessica M. Lockhart

### Scylla of the Alabama

Scylla's taking more

to men

than she'd ever

care to admit.

These days you'll find her going through a few.

I saw her in the river once,

playing at ancient catfish—giant,

grotesque, ages-long whiskers mingled

with lights reflected from the bridge

all distorted, all crude and reconfigured

something elses.

All slicked and reforming bodies—

the fish, the lights, the water,

and us on a fish fry party boat,

eating them all.

### Mapless in a Recurring Landscape

Everything is like this:

Air, brown cloud line, old

water stains on linen.

Life in sepia

dust-bowl, derelict.

I'll ask the tumble

weed where to go.

I'll ask the sage

what I smell.

Where is the yellow

page. Where the faint-

print words.

### Thirteen Ways of Looking

after Wallace Stevens

1.

When in motion, attend

to the still.

2.

Out. For glinting yellows,

deer by the road.

3.

At a half-empty glass

as a drink.

4.

Behind you.

5.

Down. Watch for pennies.

Pennies are money, too.

6.

With mirrors

surrounding your head.

7.

Relax your eyes

and a picture pops out.

8.

Scan the tuna salad. Leave

no scales.

9.

Up, maybe

at a blackbird.

10.

Use binoculars. Use microscopes.

Point great lenses to the sky.

11.

Never at the sun. Never at the face

of the holy.

12.

At the news. Would you

look at the news?

13.

Seeing the crowd, populate it

with persons.

### Things to Remember

The crunch of gravel under

sneakers at 6:30 in the morning

when the pine trees, even

the school buses, were gray.

The way the mailbox was always empty,

and a raised flag meant we would

meet later in marshy woods where

an old shack no one built fell

apart a little whenever we weren't looking.

The long route to the county school where

whites and blacks were pretty

much equal in numbers. How we liked

to think we were enlightened, but lived

on the edge of town for a reason.

The ditch that ran up to the road,

perpendicular. The one

we called the Amazon,

when the Alabama was

only the river. How Selma is

a place of water and rust and blood

and ghosts. Dad's fried deer.

Where the blackberries grew.

An empty trailer lot with no old

shack behind it, ancient Amazonian

tree stumps. A dull bus driving by

in gray morning.

### Lost: Alvin the Aardvark

When Mom finally moved I'd forgotten

that toy, and we tore up the trailer,

because you can't sell or relocate

wet pressed board and punched-in walls,

but when I saw it—

I'd had a plastic anteater. It rolled,

and it clicked, Velcro tongue

shooting out at blue-fuzz ants. I remembered orange

about it, and green. I remembered the mud

beneath us, how the water leaked and ran

below, through the floor.

I can't remember, though, how it got

there, the anteater. I'd never go

under there with a toy:

Spiders and snakes settled the damp, the cold

aluminum skirting sometimes soundtracked

in the paw-scrapes of infant cats and dogs.

I'd crawl, flashlight in hand, toward the weak

yelps of a newborn litter. But not with an anteater—

When the wide trailer split, saturated particle

board shred open in mash-up of creak and hiss,

it was revelation:

the mud, the dirt, five-gallon buckets and beer cans,

a crooked Stonehenge of half-buried

cement blocks, rotting softballs, and among the brown

and gray, the orange.

Fifteen years and still

bright, undamaged polymer, but sticker-eyes

peeled, strange blind plastic creature,

the wet smack of suction popping,

anteater removed.

James P. Leveque

### Three Films of Jean Painlevé

Our Sins in French

(Les Oursins, 1958)

Between morning yawns on the end of the jetty, divers, stripped

to the waist, waiting for the sun to kick off the sheets, burnishing lenses

and pointing out promising shallows, feel the water wet their toes.

Fishermen settle in with the haze, cigarettes dozing between fingers

stained and scratched. Their quiet French has a way of slipping around

the corner, striking down an ally, leaving a song to be remembered by.

Our sins grope the bottom of the ocean, scouring the silt and gnawing

rocks with five teeth arranged as a star, until the tide is pulled

away by the moon and the world is reduced to a dozen litres

of brackish water while the colors are wiped clean by the light

from a camera that can't but look for trouble. Our sins keep an eye

over their shoulders, fashion shivs, and don't trust how your voice pitches

up when you talk to them. And they pass away into their white

brittle skeletons, become their own headstones, landing themselves

on a desk, in a glass case, curios from the dead and the damned.

Most will land in a net, the fishermen grabbing a few for breakfast,

cracking their shells, and barely contemplating their bright-

yellow glands before taking their forks and digging in.

Hippocamp: Vivisected

(L'Hippocampe, 1934)

As if every seahorse is an oyster, growing a pearl in its gut,

able to swallow every slight, every irritation and annoyance

and wrap its own self around it, bathing it in slight, pink stone.

This bladder in its chest shines from finally being released from the lockup

of fishbones, split down the middle and spread wide like a Rorschach Test;

"What do you see?" "I see a dead fish who gave its life

for my longing to see the inside of a dead fish."

The unborn eggs are hardly alive as scissors bring light

into the father's divided womb, clip by clip. Under the flash

and whirring of the camera, there is a mild suffocation of celebrity.

Interrogatives

(Voyage dans le ciel, 1937)

What is the angle at which time lies down,

with a heaving chest, rickety pulse, and shaky knees?

How precise must be the calculations to detonate

the sun onto the page in chalk and acrylic?

When one eye is closed and the other opened, does vision, pitched

from sun to tower to hand, eventually lead back

to the vortex in the head and the brainstem?

The questions ride a hand-held Pegasus through plastic models,

the moon and Alpha Centauri suspended from visible wires

and wearing their genesis in glue and cheap paint.

Was the vegetation on Mars edible? Did it rot faster than ours?

Who placed the gemstones around Saturn in 1937?

The questions are embarrassing celluloid manuscripts of the mistakes

you can finally admit to after the sparks, water, and ashes

have taken all relevant parties halfway across Europe and America,

after time answered your letter before you finished writing it.

When the editing room light is switched off, and your sound engineer

stretched his neck, blinked, and put on his coat, did he hear

your voice through the microphone describing other planets

instead of the cars and conversations on his way home? Was he compelled

to look up to the speckled ribbon of stars between the buildings?

When you talked of loneliness on a tired planet,

were you describing the scratch and static when the needle hits

the record before the music begins?

### From Pandemonium

The wind is a brief benediction in the street, undoing scorch and sweat

yoked for weeks around the shoulders of the underemployed, sopping up

the grime of work and not enough work, from the pissed-off pavement

to shade's providence, on a café patio, where it's the absolution of gin and lime,

where water cites its Freedom of Assembly on the side of a glass,

where sensualists drink to the bikers and their 80 decibels of _Layla_ ,

and where the rarer features of a passing '41 Olds are enumerated—

"Hydra-Matic transmission," they say, "advanced for its time"—

alongside the drawbacks of psychoanalysis or Keynsianism.

A static vanguard we are, glossing the foliage of signals and feedbacks

as it speckles the sunlight with a constellation of meanings, deciphering,

like adepts, from our windows above the flagstones and the courtyards

to anticipate the hot breath rising from Pandemonium,

exhaled from the gutters down the street toward the yellow glow

in a street lamp and then, further down, another lamp, and then, another...

The music is a riff for aluminum cans echoing in a dumpster,

the rattle of one loose shopping-cart wheel and the muted creak

of bedsprings through thin walls, a sigh unexpected by its own mouth

when the printer spins out another article called, let's say, something

like _Jazz and The Real: Coltrane, Mingus, Monk_. But we still hope

to hear that movement's horizon and its _Tempo Rubato_ ,

let the pale sheet of pre-dawn fend off the day for a few minutes more

at your computer, initiating countdown on the following message:

_Dear Sirs,_

After much discussion, we recommend these few steps so that you might adapt

to your new lives: claim less luxury and wake at half-past 5;

learn to pry open sleep and reheat the remains of yesterday's coffee;

get a little Spanish under your belt. Take some comfort in the fables of the princes

of Greece and Russia, recalling their Westward escapes to New York, Baltimore,

and Montréal. In downtown, there was an archduke, a descendent of the Tsars,

managing an ice-cream parlor named The Winter Palace.

His memories of court were fond, but distant, and muted by a natural sepia,

and each one was framed and mounted on a black mat border, behind which

the Red Army smoked, drank, and waited. He perused the paper,

lamented with fellow exiles, shook his head at the unfortunate state of things,

but didn't believe in his own name anymore, in the way his title,

a spondee of bloodlines, could be anything but the polite nod from a customer,

asking him where he's from and if he's out of chocolate.

We tell you this as fair warning, as the barely-restrained id

of those who let their lawns grow untamed for weeks

and whose kids talk back, those who wait in line to be sent back to the line,

again and again, who sympathize, against their better judgment,

with the graffiti writer who renames the city, by fiat of neon orange and blue:

Deltron, Pink Lady, Futura, Krash One-Four. They claim for themselves

the belly of the expressway or the flank of the train, dirtying the decay

of broken brick walls and the legs of a viaduct going deaf,

_walking down the street singing, "_ Style _don't need a permit!"_

When the chain-link fence is too high, and the cops are too fast,

we've got a thousand mix-tapes of his voice to replay,

a slight crackle, then a little white noise before he sings it again.

It's a sentiment that ends in the irrhythmic tapping on a keyboard.

Garrulous, okay, but only to fill the outline of four walls

left bare with the occasional picture hook, wiring exposed,

cupboards raided of everything that might suggest a simple way

to express a discontent that only exists as the frustrated exhale

while standing on the corner of Least and Last, blowing dust

in the eyes, stealing round corners, taking a crack on the jaw.

### Power Lines with Piano Accompaniment

The road below the power lines offers this heat

to you—offered with pale streetlights, with distance

as the closed suture between the meanings

of drained glasses, dry bitten crusts,

the concave of spoons reflecting the inversion

of...

_Of what now?_ a barman asks again,

leaning an ear toward a woman who can't articulate

the word "whisky" over the noise. Of ten dollars

that a waiter stained with wine and the smell

of garlic swears he had; of the wine;

of the hostess thinking about going back to college;

of the chef who sees himself in the clean

of the knives he washes, and of his humming

a melody, whose name he can't recall, by Erik Satie.

_Something about gymnasts?_ He worries about his memory,

following the power lines down the road,

watching them fillet the sky, humming

like violas imagined in the ears of Satie.

Slowly and lightly, through the 1890s, his cane taps

out antiquity's waltzes on the long walk home

from Montmartre cabarets to Arcueil-Cachan

and his room above a tobacco shop, hiding a hammer

in his pocket for the thieves in the allies, back to his piano.

Through the warm night, he asks how it feels,

for miles around he asks how his piano feels.

Because he wants to know that the gods still love him,

and he believes they sleep in the grain of the wood,

so he asks how it feels. Is it tired? Will it wake?

Satie is not a metaphor, Satie is not the humming

of the power lines escaping on steel shouldered towers

into the hills, but is only the companion to the quiet,

as the chef sits on the curb to light a cigarette,

the breeze stealing a chill from the sweat

behind his ears and neck. He accepts the heat

from the pavement, puts his hand against it,

scrutinizes his index finger where the knife's reminder

of the small hazards and wages of his work

lets blood from the knuckle. It pools a bit

and the blood, too, hums the warmth and the quiet,

reflecting the thin strips of power lines

upon which gymnasts, painfully, keep their balance.

Kelsey Charles

### Autobiography

He told the story like eating soup,

hot soup that steamed boiling

fresh from the stove, and we watched,

listened as he blew languid on each word

to cool it for our consumption.

"You've lived such an interesting life,"

I said, I hovered in my admiration, waiting

for him to continue. But he stopped,

told me my life was just as interesting

and smiled knowingly.

He went back to his soup. I hung

on his words waiting for resolution.

Paris, stolen kiss, the graveyard,

the subway, the walk, the loss and escape

from commitment. By the end,

I was full. I knew the meat was in the telling.

### Fishing with Teddy

The man could not keep quiet as he cast his line,

pulled it back in, and cast it again without regard for finesse.

Teddy said, "I don't understand why the damned fish

don't like my bait." I didn't tell him they never had a chance to see it.

I offered to bring beer, but Teddy brought whisky—

"there's no point in half-assing it." It being getting drunk.

I imagine for Teddy fishing was a mythical romp of triumph

over the small brained swimmer, ending with a feast of his foe.

There was no waiting. Teddy didn't wait. For ten minutes he yo-yoed

his line in the water, never letting it rest. He asked "Are there

fish in this river? I don't think they're there." And he fidgeted:

crossed his legs, stood up, sat down, stretched an arm, formed a fist.

When he put down his rod, I knew there was trouble.

He went between the trees and broke off a branch the size of a bat.

I ducked as he took a few swings and argued when he stripped his pants.

He waded in like a hungry bear, and finally was still. Five minutes.

I jumped when the splash came, I hadn't seen him move,

but Teddy swung away and the fish flopped on the bank

beside me, a wounded enemy brought low.

"Gut it, let's eat." Teddy commanded. I complied.

### Ten Miles Away

We ate more than our stomachs could handle

that night as we sat with my Dad's friends

I'd only just met, but the pots still over flowed with meats.

The sausage and bratwursts, the steaks and lamb

tenderloin, the pork chops all remained. The fried

potatoes, the creamed corn, long skinny beans, and

bits of carrot, we couldn't finish. But they smiled

as I fell out of my chair, too heavy for legs.

And we rested outside, on the porch, the nylon chairs

sagging. I gazed at the fields without end until

the clear Kansas night fell. And they told me

the land was so flat you never knew the horizon,

that my eyes would break before I saw the end.

And there was a storm that night, but we were dry,

watching lightning spring from the sky ten miles away,

soundlessly illuminating the clouds in the dark.

### I dreamt I died in Montparnasse

I dreamt I died in Montparnasse,

a careening moped to the skull.

People rushed around my body

and I watched them in third person.

I was abstract, a spirit, a specter

wandering in my death, the streets

around were filled with life, and I felt

apart. Then my vision blurred

and I saw other beings, great hordes

of ghosts and ghouls about the town

strolling through the living.

The artists and musicians of Paris past

romped about, gathered together again.

In the spaces they were most alive

they returned to in their death.

Outside of Henry Tanner's house they

beat against the gate, the lines of pilgrims

returned for comments on their work.

They huddled in the sunny shadows,

burdened with translucent canvases

clutched to keep from drifting.

The Bobino raged with crowds while

Josephine waved from a car outside.

She'd returned in her prime, showered

in illusionary ticker tape parade.

It poured from the sky and floated

down through shades of past and present.

At the St. Louis Bar that night, phantom

jazz twined with modern pop, though

neither heard the other. The bar was packed

with dead on living, both dancing non-stop.

The air kinetic, emotions of both groups

went rushing like a flood. They moved

as though their souls depended on the joy

they'd felt in their warm blood.

### John

You lay in the field, liquor in hand,

dead with brandy for blood.

You were hard to see in the two foot weeds,

Why couldn't you have died courteous?

The kids who stepped on you didn't flinch,

except for the new kid

from Connecticut. He looked on

as the neighbor kids rummaged

in your pockets. Thank him

that you were picked up at all.

When the morgue man came,

he saw fourteen dollars:

you were his dinner with a coke.

He called you John, and apologized

for the bumpy ride.

On the icy tray they laid you flat,

struggled with your arms,

then left you in the freezer bank

for someone else to claim.

Go on, wait in the closet for no one.

Therese L. Broderick

### Polly

Better that my daughter forget

her weakest rabbit, one I loved

the most, white runt Polly

born lame, her red eyes

the spitting image of rabid;

and kept away from our cat,

penned inside our zoo—

warmest upstairs room—

which might've been filled with

a baby crib, rocker,

and a table for all those changes

of onesies, had I ever wanted

to have another baby, but no,

never did want

to risk

playing favorites. And better that

my little girl was sleeping

that evening Polly shriveled

like a flawed corsage

on the carpet, between my knees,

on my lap her rear leg ceasing

to twitch: first of twenty limbs

to wither. First rabbit to die,

just shy of those four equal

survivors, my sturdy orphans.

### To the Motionless One in Egypt

Pup, will you lift your dry head, open dusty eyelids

if I slap you hard on your ribs, tug at your right ear,

force open your jaws with the rim of my bottle,

will you rise on front paws if I flee my tour, leap

into this pit of crumbling columns, only shade for miles

you might perish in—or the other strays pant in—

which parchment was once your milking mother?

Pup, are you sinking through Valley of the Queens

or sailing to Ra, or will you rouse soon as I've gone

back to the bus, through tinted windows glimpsing

your resurrection but forbidden—ever—to touch

the miracle, to rest my hand on your salting belly.

### Pistol Squat

Fuck any aim of Zen

humility.

I do squats as means

of combat, BMI

held to 20.

Right knee bent, left leg deployed

like the barrel of a

handgun.

Ankle cocked & hard core

burning down

inch by

inch.

Target: the toe:

Fix it.

three two one

Fire.

### The Old Stylist

She soothes by comb, making it all better,

she wants to make hairs happy once

again, as they were before neglect—

my cheap shampoo, steely bristles—

and she wants to move to a city warm

with tropical reds & mauves & yellows,

new textures she can improve upon

every eight weeks, or six

and she doesn't want the water spray too hot

on my head or the dryer helmet too close

or the cut too short, or highlights too bright

for my grey eyes, she wants to retire

after a few more years of this, squeezing perfect

tablespoons of perm gel, rescuing roots,

coating every gal in her chair with bliss: the do

will be so much easier going forward.

### With Lines from All My Diaries Since the Millennium

She rehearses the words of Zeus, aloud,

waiting in bed

for breakfast.

Mistletoe is a veiled parasite,

and my party mask is the back

of a round mirror.

Of the pumpkin

she takes 50 photos, then says to me,

you're too overflowing.

My husband's mother (God help her)

put Superglue in the corner

of a false eyelash.

2010 was the best year of my life:

I almost had Asperger's. Until

my doctors agreed: _you don't have Asperger's._

Loud, soft, loud, soft: patterns

I snore in. He groans in.

"Singers Wanted"

pleads a bumper sticker;

"Sonnet"

declaims a license plate.

Did you know that some tornadoes

can swirl invisible?

Lane Falcon

### Touch

He stands in my bedroom doorway and goes on about how this is it then, I won't see him again, and I sit in my antique chair and cradle her while she sucks out the last ounce of her bottle, and he shivers a little in that threshold— _don't try and call me, nothing. When my daughter's older, I'll tell her the truth_ —and the silence turns pink in my mouth, then orange, then blue.

•

At five, he romped

barefoot in a pigpen

in the Dominican Republic,

his aunt would sterilize

a needle and pick whipworms

from the bottoms of his feet.

He, with a matching pair

of sneakers for every outfit,

whose rubber soles jut

just over the edge of my bed,

my incredulity matched

by wonder. In my dream,

the worm's pointed head

pricks through the skin

of my index finger. Tweezers

finally grip the exposed

eighteenth of an inch,

and it stretches,

stretches, its length

lodged in my flesh,

til the tweezers slip

and the worm, still one,

snaps back into

position.

### The Descent

Why do they ignore me?

My sister and mother, who don't

look themselves but svelte, decorous

in frosted lipstick.

The voice says _you died_.

Me? The ghost of this house

where I found what I stole? A broken

VHS and the diary

of the gastroenterologist I dated.

On the mantelpiece,

a picture of me at The Gala leans

without frame. How blithe I was

with my chipped nail polish

and glitter wallet, how little I cared

my hair clung to the fringe

of the circular rug . . .

### Dream Feed

The infant hatches from sleep,

a hiccup, chirp and gasp

reel me from bed

to the edge of her crib. Her eyes

jerk upward.

In minutes, they'll latch onto mine

as I push the latex nipple

between her lips, hurry

to quell her rage.

She bats the anime toy clipped

to the car seat where I've placed her

while I mix Similac and nursery water,

my panic, a current an inch below the coos

One second Baby.

Hold on Honey,

I'm here—

### My Father Fixes My Portable A/C

_If it would only grip,_ he says, _just a little_ ,

the plastic hose clamped between his bent

knee and elbow, as he tries to screw the open

end into the "duct." I now know the name

for it—the part I circled with painters tape

from when I moved in six years ago (adhering

to itself, it twisted thin as twine as I brought it

round the hose, then patched it, again and again,

when chutes of humid air pushed through,

arrows of sun piercing clouds). Even the word

"grip" fits, what neither part will do as he seals

their tenuous kiss with aluminum tape, welding

the last few grooves of the hose to the duct's

ridge.

Ricky Ray

### The Bird

I

She looked over and saw a bird underneath a city tree,

its head sunken,

its body so still and low we thought it dead.

Then it struggled to lift its head and showed us:

one eye swollen, an inlaid marble,

the other swollen and crusted over,

the beak grotesque with infection.

It wobbled its head like five-hundred pounds,

shook as though a fault line were widening,

and it was.

Her heart leapt out of her and I felt it and mine followed.

Then I acted out of pain and frustration,

that sobering, sorrowful uselessness,

told her to get up, I wanted action, said

sitting there being sad was doing nothing to help it,

and that was true, or maybe it wasn't,

but it was the wrong way to say it,

the wrong way to harness this energy

hovering over a life that was broken and breaking apart.

We carried our groceries upstairs,

called the rehab center and left a message.

Got down the cat carrier,

made a nest out of socks and an old T-shirt,

a nest we'd made before, and told the cats to be good.

II

Then we went down and she cupped it in her hands

and lowered it in, covered it, told me

how cold it felt, and bony: even less of a chance.

I found hand warmers in our emergency kit,

shook them and placed them over its wings.

She filled a tea cup with water

and dripped drops along its beak.

We couldn't tell if it swallowed,

tried to decide what to do,

turned to the internet for help.

It didn't offer much.

Then I heard commotion in the cage,

saw it flapping and called her over.

Maybe the warmers were too hot,

or maybe it wanted freedom,

from here, from its body, from life, just—out.

She held it again, tried to shh its heart calm.

It settled for a moment.

Then it flapped harder,

flipped itself over, scrambled its claws in the air.

We saw the gash along its body, how wasted its flesh,

felt its inability to eat and she made the call.

I had no doubt in the right of her heart.

Something in me knew this was coming,

forefelt the tears in her eyes,

the dread in my limbs.

III

I found the sharpest, largest knife I could

and hid it along the arm of my sweater.

She asked if I was going to break its neck.

I shook my head, said I wasn't confident

that would be as quick and painless as it seemed;

what I had in mind would be quicker and sure.

She asked if she could carry it to the roof,

and I said yes, picked up a plastic bag for after.

Then she asked if she could help,

and I said no, wanted to spare her that,

and she didn't protest or ask again,

walked to the other side of the roof and cried.

IV

I held it down on a flat rock,

its head drooping on that mangled neck,

felt the strength in its muscle

as I pinned it down

—so faint—

pressed the blade gently but steadily into its throat,

its beautiful, purple-green, grey feathered throat,

and sliced,

quick and hard,

in one swift stroke

severing spine and head

and leading its blood toward the light.

God, how that headless body writhed,

bucked for minutes against

the stillness that called it out of this world,

or down through its seams

into the underbelly of existence,

and no wonder it shook:

all that energy leaving the body at once.

I walked over and hugged her then,

saw her wet, red, swollen eyes

and felt pangs I have no words for.

V

I asked her to get napkins

and two more plastic bags

to clean up what I'd done.

She did.

I cleaned, kept the head with the body and wrapped it in white.

She saw the knife on the way down and knew.

We placed it in the freezer,

with the others we'd found on our walks through the city,

so many avian deaths dotting the sidewalks.

We'd bury them soon,

before winter and its hardening

made the ground and the task even more . . . more what?

I don't know.

But she thanked me then, and that—that I understood.

VI

Later that day,

she said a good man

is better than a great one.

I know what she means.

And when she says it,

I believe her.

She said her heart felt better, lighter,

at ease in the release—its,

the relief—ours.

VII

I went up there the next morning

to check the spot:

all that was left was an already fading,

poorly wiped-up pool of blood.

That, and something I couldn't name,

something that passes between us in times like these,

something that made my whole body tingle with affection

when I went back down and watched her sleep.

Something that stirs deep in this being,

deep where we are no longer merely human,

spreads its wings and flies with me,

flies through me now here to you.

IIX

Is this sufficient?

Have I made the life of the bird

and our involvement in it an honored thing?

Is this good enough to put down the pen,

bow my head to life and its ways

and let nature carry on?

I don't know, but it feels good enough

to sleep on, and at the moment,

that's good enough for me.

IX

Goodnight,

dear bird,

I'll say hello

to your fellows

in the morning.

X

And thanks, world,

for whatever it is

I received today—

I don't need

to know its name.

### Chopping Wood

I liked going out in the rain,

so much rain in that land

of green hills, evergreens

and infections of the lung,

liked stepping through

puddles in my once

water-resistant boots

as I made my way

to the woodshed where

I'd pull the rusty light-cord,

check for spider webs,

then eye the piles,

one of oak, several of fir,

and pick the next ashes

for our old-fashioned,

wood-burning stove.

Then I'd carry the logs

to the chopping block

and drop them, not carelessly,

but less concerned with

the way they'd lie

than the way they fell,

and wonder about

the woodsman who felled them,

how he'd ponder

bringing them down

from the sky

and selling them

by the cord, whether

the land was his

or he bought them,

walking through

and showing which,

splashing paint

on the bark

to remember.

Then I'd pick up the logs,

heft the weight

of wood in my hand

and place them on the block,

this time with care

so they wouldn't fall

and would offer me

their broadest face

to swing my favorite

axe down into.

And then I'd begin

the work that took me

out in the rain in joy,

I'd measure my paces

back from the block,

a two-hundred fir

by my quick reckoning,

I'd lower my hands

along the shaft,

send the heavy head

along its arc

and throw some

muscle into the slice.

And if the wood

was placed right

and the swing

was hard enough,

if hand and eye, mind

and muscle came together

in perfect concert,

the wood would split,

the blade would embed

ever so slightly

in the face of the block,

and I'd place my sole

on the edge of that old fir,

I'd firm my grip on the handle

and use the leverage

of my body

to bring

the axe-glint

back into the light.

And if any of those

things was off, the axe

would get stuck

in the little log, and I'd

lift it, axe and all, over my head

and come crashing down

until it split, or the blade would

stick in the block

deeper than I'd intended

and I'd have to tease it

side to side while

I tried to coax it out.

An hour's rain later,

out it would come,

the wood would be split

and I'd pile it in my arms,

careful of splinters,

then carry it in

to warm the bodies,

the lives of my

wife and children.

Once, I missed the log

and the block entirely

and the blade

glanced off my shin,

but made no damage,

no cut, not even a bruise,

and I thought of how

easily the bone

would have splintered,

I felt pain at

the thought of

being a tree

subject to the woodsman's

expertise, the loss of shade

that was respite

to so many creatures,

the nests

that may have been woven

high up

in the swaying branches,

the resting spots

for migrants, playgrounds

for squirrels, the haunts

for owls whose screeches

scorched us in our beds,

the cats alert with God

only knows in their ears.

And I thought of the grave

I dug on that property,

larger than a man's grave,

the size of a woman

and child I thought

as I dug through dirt

into grey clay

that didn't want to be dug,

the mother llama looking on

and moaning low

as her child's body

decomposed under the tarp.

Then I stepped

out of the rain

onto the doorstep,

opened the door

and saw those

dear faces,

and was glad all that

thinking and chopping

was behind me.

Phoebe Reeves

### Every Petal

The roses in the pitcher open

their gradient of desire.

My flesh blooms, too, and I travel

its gradations: fulfillment,

need, silence. The white

at the height of the curve, what

comes after speech.

After petals come

loose in the hand.

Without the fruiting

body, the red hip

violent against winter's

shushing monochrome, tart and disdainful.

Muscle, also pink,

also loosening, clenches

its last bud. Releases its last bloom of blood.

### What We Don't See When We Witness

Twice, I sang with nine other women,

all older than me, beneath the shadow

of the stage, behind the orchestra's last row.

The bassoons, the fourth violins, the harp.

Just back and above I could hear the feet

rustling and thumping down. Titania,

Bottom, Puck, the pas de deux, the local

ballet school girls all dressed

as tiny fairies—I would see them after,

leaving with their parents, cheeks flushed like

the flowers they were supposed to be.

Three hundred dollars was enough

to take the train up and stay in my old

bedroom, regress in age and occupation,

be the chorus girl again, without spot

lights, in matte black like stage hands,

singing only a small part while the story's

feet in worn pointe shoes tattooed its

old tune behind me, in the lights.

Three years ago this winter J took E

to the emergency room, late and in the

cold dark of old December, two days

back from their honeymoon. Her breath

came short in the car, shorter, and he

left her at the bay doors to park the car.

No E when he ran back, no breath.

Just the halogen lighting and the scrubs

and the obscene gift shop.

Was it looking back or not

that lost Orpheus his wife?

I never knew any ballet better than

the one I never saw.

### Atomic Oneiromancy

We see the bomb in the distance, knowing

the radiation comes. We can't

just crawl into a lead-lined refrigerator like Indiana

Jones, and come out adjusting our fedoras.

First, nausea. Weariness, blurred

eyesight. Then, the dreaded hair

on the pillow, coming loose at the root.

The cells of the stomach and intestines

slough off like a glove peeled

inside out. Can't eat, can't drink,

veins thin under skin like dry

river beds. Isn't that far enough

to go?

Or is it worse to live past the present

crisis, to imagine all our little half buried

codes clicking on in the genome,

like land mines waiting for the pressure

trigger, precious inheritance

passed down for generations, all

the rigors of natural selection

switched on at once as we

flick the light on over our heads,

and watch it rain down, alpha,

beta, gamma, the alphabet

of our unmaking. If not this,

then something else.

### Enthymeme

All enzymes are catalysts, therefore they battle entropy.

You enter the house enumerating your domestic sins,

trying not to envy the dancers jumping high in their entrechat—

remember, their toes look like hamburger.

During the entr'acte they shoot up their feet with Novocain and cry.

Such is beauty.

You get all entangled in the entourage of your insecurities,

but the pruned redbud trees are never too mangled

to put out the tiny cilia of their good looks come March.

You are not entitled to any more entropy than the rest of us.

Pause. Make your entrance.

Entertain the guests. Envelop them in your hearty

goodwill. Enunciate their names, making eye contact.

They will remember how you reached out your hand,

your enthusiasm for their chatter.

It's better to find comfort in their enthrallment, the canapés,

the gossips picking through the absent players'

entrails, than to be on stage, ensnared in the one spot light,

waiting for your partner in the pas de deux.

He'll never show.

There's only the entreaty of the crowd and the ensuing silence.

The creak of the worn wood boards.

Did you think your waiting would entrance all these

entrenched carnivores? You're an entrepreneur in a desert,

a seamstress in a nudist colony, a chauffeur

in an automobile museum, a museum on the moon.

You are entombed in your own environs

and your patrons applaud when you fold down,

fetal, under the sodium lights, and press your entire body to the stage.

David Livingstone Fore

### Eternity is a very long time or a very short time

Perched between

a stone bear

& bull on

this common winter lunchtime

Below

me men

& women swim up

Sutter Street

These ones will die

so their spawn had better take

Lather rinse repeat

I am joined here by six

or seven others . . . cormorants drying our wings before

setting out over

the sea stretching before

us each

A short-cropped gray-haired citizen bends over

the Sporting Green like a pathologist deducing what led to

the swoon this June that killed the Giant's chances

Below me is a man

or the facsimile of

one lying athwart

a step whose feet long ago forgot the inside of

a pair of

but whose mad mats of

hair offer a pillow for

his head

& so on

In

this moment I would like to believe in

many things including how well the cold sun shines off

my white shirt

& my tightly tied shoes

& my clean-shaven face

Q: Who am I kidding?

A: ________________.

Two years back now

& I still wonder which country is overseas

Nothing is as it should be

I can hardly breathe

because of too much oxygen in

the air

or nitrogen

or something else

Nothing feels right nothing looks right nothing sounds right

It's all been switched around

Mirrors hang backwards forcing me read my face right to

left

Clean sheets are sandpaper against

my skin

so I sleep

w/out

Those 2:00 am vigils stretch 'til

dawn

as I listen for

movements of

any soul enemy

or friend

But then the man looks up from

his newspaper

& swivels his head

as do all the other guys

& so on even the drifter

which could only mean _one_ thing

so I monkey the men

& my eyes fill

w/a billowy blue skirt

& olive-skin legs

& a fury of

red hair

A woman walking westward t r a v e l l i n g s l o w m o t i o n

though not like on

TV

but deliberate motion instead

Fluid graceful

& strong all shoulders

& hips propelling her body forward

even as she sustains herself in

place in

time in

mind each movement telegraphing her intent to

the earth

so the planet may shift

& so benefit from

the blessings of

each

fall

of

each

foot

There is also this blond @

her side a woman

w/the kind of

looks that were she to walk into

a bar alone she'd just cold-stop all talk on

the spot

but today hers is a mere rivulet of

prettiness swept away by

the flood of

beauty flowing from

the woman in

blue

I start moving from

my position

& when I reach street level

her eyes lock onto

mine

& mine to

hers

It's this instantaneous thing electric + mutual + raw

Then the blond says something that makes her laugh

She laughs

& laughs

& laughs

& as she laughs she folds @

the waist then upright like a fountain of

water then she folds again

as the mirthful hem of

her skirt bounces @

her knees

& her breasts sway under

the fall of

the fabric of

her blouse

She laughs like today is the only day

She passes on by

as I watch her backside retreat like a beacon inviting

& denying me an ember growing small

& cold.

### Ing

What a popsicle-sucking fan-waving shade-hogging hog-hauling arse-ogling tongue-parching donkey-stopping feet-perspirating cheese-racing Sata/n-sitting fig-gnawing grape-seed-sucking cigar-chomping chad-hanging milk-carton-reading iceberg-melting answer-machining little-girl-fondling nail-biting carpet-bombing Hitler-longing cuck-olding Lord's-name-in-vane-taking totally-tripping brown-nosing pencil-nibbling knee-jerking water-wasting loose-tooth-wiggling whore-whispering autoerotic-asphyxiating chain-smoking blister-peeling chin-chinning social-networking mother-stabbing father-fearing tumor-palpating granma-fleecing gas-lighting Berlin-lifting baby-dangling water-boarding Treasury-raiding pressure-cooking turkey-plucking love-handle-grabbing cleavage-leering hem-pulling leaf-blowing pig-sticking scrotum-scalding nipple-twisting beluga-bludgeoning harp seal-strumming level-heading nasal-excavating global-weirding needle-pointing nit-picking likker-slurping tea-partying craptastic-poetry-generating slow-dancing three-times-heel-tapping dog-snatching cat-scratching snatch-dogging hardly loafing time.

### The sea is always the color of your last lost love's eyes

I spot San Diego wedged into

the lower left-hand corner like a secret

as the remaining nation fans north

& east

I am told my main problem is never remembering clichés

& the sea is always the color of

your last lost love's eyes

That's why I occupy these dunes above

the beach

as the sun above bakes my back each morning

& the crown of

my head by

noon before

finally blinding me @

the blue end of

day

I spend the final afternoon peeling layers away to nothing

but desire for

the astringent sea

I sprint across

the beach

& dive into

the face of

a towering wave

& rise to

the surface beyond

the breakers where an otter bobs in

a hidden kelp forest the

to crest

I join in up then

as each new swell draws us down

the

After an hour other

it gets cold side

so I ride the surf into

shore bathing in

forces beyond

ken

& control

Sand up

my nose

Water in

my mouth

Astonished

& alive

The final colors dribble down

the sky

covering for

the night

that steals light from

the undone day

A promise never made

I shake off the sea

& cross the beach to

a pier where I pass a burly black man who wears snow gear in

summer

& plays space music on

his synthesizer

w/a sign that says Jesus Is A Fisher of

Men

& there's also this Vietnamese guy casting

& casting his bait upon

the waters

& a pair of

lovers loving one another against

the wooden railing

w/half-empty soda cans dangling from

their still-free hands

The further out I go the fewer people I meet

until it's just me

& the slivered silver moon hanging

like an open palm just beyond my reach

Jesus had it easy he wasn't fishing for

the moon.

Tim Hawkins

### Northern Idyll

Flushed and fevered, appalled by the city,

you crept through nightfall over shards of glass

back to the Northern forest, whence you'd come;

An upland preserve of bear wallow and fattening deer

where tannic alder and maple-soaked rivers cool

like a tonic the color of tea or bourbon,

depending on your need.

You had planned to wade their timeless eddies,

to meander in their cloudy back currents,

to imagine lost loves and idylls

and absent friends,

until the night I arrived at your door

with furrowed brow and frown as tight

as my clenched and trembling fist

to solve the latter once and for all,

and to bring word from the late city

with its campaign slogans and broken bottles,

scorched pavement and red-rimmed,

downcast eyes,

word of the woman and child denied

this leafy province of despair.

### The Leap

I hold your small hand in mine

while salmon lunge

and hurt themselves

on the rocks beneath us,

chasing death,

immortality

and a dim and watery notion

of home.

In the not-too-distant past,

folks from the east side of town

arrived in horse carts and carriages

on this bluff above the river,

hailing one another

in the cool of evening

as they gaped at the bounding rapids

and the bears

who fished below.

With a promise of ice cream in hand,

we make our way to the car

parked on the bluff—

now a park

surrounded by hospitals,

apartments

and schools.

One day you will return without me

and you will understand

like the generations of salmon and men,

that though the bears and horse carts

may be gone,

the poorly understood migrations

and countless wet dreams

remain.

### The Gallery

My wife was born in a tropical climate

where trees flourish through sun and rain

and the four seasons are a myth passed down

and diluted like generations of conquistador blood.

Here, in Michigan, she is fascinated by the falling leaves,

how some nights they swirl and dance across the road

seeming to perform for our oncoming headlights,

and she chides me for failing to notice such beauty.

Thanks to her insistence I now have another experience

to reconsider, another image to call to mind

in the cold and austere days that will come

soon enough, in the long, white gallery of winter.

### A Rain

A sudden chilling autumn rain

blows through darkening fields and towns,

drums on moss and weakens stones,

moistens eyes and dampens skin;

shrouds the bleak and withered hedge,

snaps the slender wavering branch,

floods a narrow wooden bridge,

and gathers battened skiffs to launch;

takes no heed of wall or fence

nor burnished plaque to mark the deed,

seeks the least resistant path,

deaf to human remonstrance

and blind to monuments of their dead.

### The Archives

After the stabbing light of the sun

has dimmed to a wintery ache in the eye,

one grows accustomed to stark interiors,

intimate with corridors

and their convolutions

of gun-metal gray.

After a certain period of adjustment

amid the superficial scrape and glint

of marble halls and their distorted

echoes of coughing like laughter

in the rarefied air,

after the clatter of metal slamming

and footsteps marching away in lockstep,

then fading along the corridor,

something rare that we are gifted

and burdened to name

is bred in the silence that follows

and filed away.

There is a veneer of winter solitude

that can linger then, briefly,

like snowfall melting on clothing

or that can remain for a longer term

like wintering in some forest hollow,

marking a more remote frontier,

a knife's claim on ragged bone

bounded by a feverish wind.

Perhaps that is the end of it, after all,

a sudden shiver, an abrupt decision

followed by the tinkling of ice

and a return to the sunny port

of conviviality.

Or perhaps, after numerous seasons,

after window-less years spent

locked in dutiful chambers

by turns airless or drafty,

idly tracing the torn and faded map

of one's veins,

from some half-remembered story

rescued from the false bottom

of memory

one hears apocryphal footsteps

creeping away

along the chilly corridor

among the snowy drifts—

a second self

cloaked in the terrible

gift or burden

of a second skin.

One imagines archival landscapes,

even the frozen scar of a frown

so like a familiar horizon.

Abigail F. Taylor

### On the Pillow Where You Lie

Pause. Pluck the moon into memory

before the sun cracks open the yolk of dawn.

Sorrow weak and gone in reverie

of heaven's breast bone; the wild blue rambling on.

In this now, I am not watching you die.

You are whole and fit to me as you were

once, when we were new. And foolish.

We, Tom and Huck, aged hard this year.

I won't be ready for your rye

departure, your stone-wrought name slurred

in clipped grass. I am too selfish

to let you go. With death so near

I mourn the living you, but it's not dark

yet. Soon the moon will cradle its mouth between

the burden of sky. You and I, marked

by fate, thrust into an idle god's routine.

### The Older One

I do not have a fairy-tale sister.

Not the sort with twisted fingers

and charred spirit. She is the winter

between seasons. She is only a whisper;

the gladness of fresh snow and honey lemon tea.

What we are is not a Hollywood marquee.

We do not gossip or share ice cream.

We are ships in the night.

Blood strangers.

Once in the morning light

we built stick houses for The Green Folk.

Begonias ruined and laid by the stream

to garnish crowns as we sang "Da Luan, Da Mart."

All for a moment.

I am as unsure of her as I am of that day.

Small clean memories are too few to be forgotten.

Sisters, we are told, have a bond that is uncommon.

Not so. Sometimes sisters struggle to obey

the path. We fall apart. Unaware of the dangers.

### Young Australian

We lay in the summer bed

having never slept together

but for the steady breath

and the quiet warmth

of our arms pressed as one.

### A Threesome with Liquor

Ah yes! Music is the fool of love

but not as forgiving as rusted brandy

shattered like the melody.

Reach for that tender woman in the bottle

then tell me you adore me.

But goodness falls short of

this. You, unable to hold promises, scanty

in bockety hands, are still astoundingly

beautiful.

We often cherish the difficult things.

They glue together small pleasures.

You sleeping while I read.

Fresh bread kneaded together.

Silk sheets against bare thighs.

But erratic days become too much and bring

hair pulling ENOUGH! That pressures

the twist of conflicted needs.

I learned to never trust you

and I am at fault for trying.

### Immaculate Exception

another song for Ruben.

To this day

your heat is engraved

into the grooves of my fingers

Remember

we sang, Tomorrow!

Our eager dreams stretched

beyond the time you borrowed

This month. This hour

sorrow worships

_all_ your names

And when this sour

thing

rubs raw young flesh

I don't want to go on

and can't . . .

Go on.

Oh to speak with you

One. Last. Time.

The only voice I hear is

my own darkness

Or worse. Nothing.

And I am sorry I never cooked you breakfast.

Joey DeSantis

### Baby Names

Let's call him Baby Doom

or maybe Tricycle Madness would better suit him

or Lester's Little Secret, Braunze, Fire Catcher

Blood Drinker or The Dream Machine

Samuel is nice too, I know

but you ruled that one out months ago

You also ruled out Jacob, Peter, Daniel, Addison

and Joseph

which was my baby name brainchild but

oh well

You are right to want something flashier

like Superjerk, Gnashings St. Claire, Lydio

Brother's Bane, Davidson

or even just Slice

He will go on to do great things potentially

Of this your blond-winged friend was certain

so long, he said, as we pick just the right name

And so we must ask ourselves

would Cookies N' Cream rid the world of evil

or merely turn the other cheek?

Could an angry Clementine overturn a money table?

I think not, but Jesus might

Why not Jesus?

Or how about Jeezus

Now there's a boy destined for something greater

a boy who could easily hold his own inside the ring

maybe an Italian with a great sob story

I can already see the headlines and the VIP tickets proclaiming

Red Foam Drinker versus Little Baby Jeezus

I see our root beer cups overflowing as our heavenly son

deals RFD a left hook for the ages

fated, unable to hold back, winning

all the fruits of our careful planning

### Out of Time

My father is flowing clockwise

in a holiday sweater vest and a gold chain watch

He is down in the groove, swimming through

the electric grey rooms

kept warm by the stove light, and on the table

a bowl of ham and pea soup

Immigration was his grandfather's story

yet he too finds comfort in the small

At night, laying himself in the arms of his armchair

he can at last afford to go nowhere

My mother is flowing counter-clockwise

still as beautiful as she was

fifteen years ago, twenty years

back when the sun and sky made a point

to match everything that she wore

I believe now that they even changed colors

for her secret moods

Had I known it then I might have seen her apart from me

Her jade necklace is timeless

Her laughter is timeless, his records and her red coat

that he gave her that she always wore

I grow

I am the clock–the testament to the full length of things

I tell it like it is

The dinner plates with the hearts on the rims, they are timeless

until another one breaks (not out of anger)

Not out of anger, I dropped it

Out of time

She asks, How many are left?

A wedding present, he says, it was our very first set

How many are left?

I point:

Two

### We Can Sell the Antiques

On most East Coast beaches

the shorelines and their crowds tend to look the same

So long as you don't look at either too long or too hard

or lift your eyes to see a lighthouse

twirling about in some other town's coat of paint

you can fool yourself

There is a mansion in Asbury Park filled with junk you can never quite unsee

Six door knocker faces, a pair of red kissing manikin torsos, twenty-three beautician's scissors

dulling in the back of your brain's dark closet

sorry-eyed, turning undead

all of it grooming a monstrous shadow

until there might be anything in that house

and everything in there might remind you of it

Today it is crowded

on the beach where kids seem to have only one kind of scream

Small talk, heavy feet, dark eyes

She must know that she is not the one walking beside you today

but so long as she doesn't risk everything with a look, two distressed searchlights, blue

she can fool herself too

### Death Considers the Buttercups

One track, one mind

Death must glide along these buttercups

without pausing to consider them

even as they hug the train of his cloak

in their harmless fervor to be chosen

by truly anyone

And yet, in a small and secret way

hidden as his hands and feet

that are weary for their journey's end

by the shed where his old man waits

still humming in his wife's wide-brimmed hat,

Death does consider them

The buttercups, who let him go just as quietly, no thorns

leaving only a yellow signature (a suggestion) to be remembered by

He would have sucked them dry

or at least taken a few lazy, arching swipes at their heads

but it isn't their time yet and besides

he still has a long way to go

### On Lent

Low ceilings are still en vogue

as is setting aside money in small increments

to prepare for the wise and lonely years

We all at times need God's wrath or a Great Depression

to keep our thoughts from becoming too silly or from towering precariously

I vow to not be so outlandish

with my spending

and to apply this kind of discipline to future relationships

so that one day I may find and keep true adult love

For Lent I used to give up red squash

which I hated just as much as the other colors of squash

the purple, the green, the blue

I still do

I regret the bacon bits that ended up on my salad yesterday

that were not supposed to end up there

I pray for the strength to avoid the near occasion of bacon bits

And to understand that true love is made up of sacrifices both small and silly

True love is unsexy and is nothing to be ashamed of

Last night I dreamed

that something surprised me so much that I

swallowed the whole world

Knowledge, Wealth, and Power drifted silently across a lake in my belly

And while I considered hurling them back into the void

I was scared that I might start a new world war and possibly get shot in it

I had firmly resolved to never give up anything

when a searching voice called out my name from deep inside of me

and I felt a great relief at being judged

Cameron Price

### Every Morning

New moons fade to longing,

filling the air with transfusions of autumn light.

In the crevices of sleep, the world dreams

of tossing a coin :

heads, we wake up // tails, we keep sleeping.

It is always tails, the doldrums of the covers.

( _listen_ ) every morning a clear white note

breaks out over the land : it's the snap of a

dream sundering.

In that moment, everything wakes up :

moss undulates in a breeze that

is not there;

the mice collect twigs and hair

to build palaces;

the deer gather to search out the

most delicate rosebushes to plunder.

And then it ends.

Things revert to rising slowly, as from

a daze or stupor.

Some things feel more hopeless than others :

maybe your back aches mysteriously or you

worry habitually about the bills.

But yet there is still that moment, every morning,

when everything pulses at once, tributary to

one rhythmic source.

Don't blink // don't sleep.

We must try to rise and feel it every morning,

to remember who we are.

### The Silence of The Dead

The final cessation is

a tomb, a stone cup, a chorus,

flung far into a dream

of black water and the rushing

of exhausted exits.

This is the hymn of listening,

a secret hid from the world.

In this cavern, cut smooth

by centuries of bitter water,

I find a pool of gaping shadow.

The bones of every being that came before me

sleep submerged and wait for a sign :

they, too, listen

for a revelation on the other side of the silence.

I tread the stones around the edge,

and watch the brittle hands of the dead wave

like kelp in a secret current.

I kneel and lean my face down to the water

to kiss the menagerie of bones

arranged in grooves of sleep.

A slender finger bent in cold yearning

reaches for my lips

and their memory of warmth :

a frigid caress.

The wait rolls on in constant flow,

in this tomb, this holy cup,

the chorus of the dead :

This is the hymn of listening,

A secret hid from the world.

Now I, too, wait and reach

for lips that come to kiss the dead,

the waiting,

waiting for the end of silence,

for the tomb to break open,

for hope to break open,

and breathe.

### L'Ancien Chanson d'Hiver

A thousand yards of linen are not long enough to record this story,

written on the skins of onions in yellow thread,

sewn by fingers of light.

I am in a place, existing in liminal spaces,

like a shred of yesterday lingering in a patch of morning shadow,

fleeing the noon eye.

I am the concrete road, splayed like a compass,

pointing towards your future : walk on.

I am open, split like the gaping mouths of lions,

my strength laying in the multiplicity of my pieces,

the hydra of my being : I live.

Come to this place, warm and humming :

the perfume of a hornet's nest in June,

the smell of honey in a tree, raw and woody.

Find me there, between the gaps of leafless trees,

waiting like the smell of smoke,

in dappled puddles on a wet path.

I wait there writing my story,

on the backs of beetles and the fingers of bats.

I am there singing this poem through the pores of a leaf,

the mouth of a dandelion.

I am there like a thought, the memory of a still pond in winter,

the sadness of the night passed away.

So wait : be my friend.

Sing this song with me in the hollow of my open hand.

Add to my fullness, find me in the ancient song of winter:

Attende-moi, aime-moi, et chante, mon cher, cher ami.

David Walker

### Sestina for Housesitting

Don't you feel like the forgotten piece

of luggage? The product of heel-

scraping left on the rug before

they all go off to forget

the humdrum. Bottle

of cleaner in hand

like a sidearm weapon, you finger

the trigger. It brings you peace.

Much more than that bottle

of Jack. Far from healed,

you just want to forget

the mess you found just before

you went to bed. You think of before

all this, when "scrubbing on hands

and knees" was only a forgetful

turn of phrase acquired piece-

meal from easily-healed

fairy tale characters bottle-

necked into life-lessons. You think of the bottled

up frustration that needs outlet before

they return, the time you had to walk heel-

to-toe along a night-lit road, arms

outstretched like traipsing. _Piece_

_of cake,_ you boasted, forgetting

this cop had no sense of humor. Forget

drinking yourself numb. You need to bottle,

compartmentalize each and every piece

of envy you have of them before

you snap and decide to hand

the dog off to the heels

of a stranger. You say he's a good dog. _Heel,_

you demonstrate, hoping the dog didn't forget

that command. Seal it with a shake of the hand.

_Good riddance_. Instead, you grab the bottle

of cleaner again and spray. You knew before-

hand that you would be leaving pieces

of yourself scattered around like shattered bottles

and they would come home and say, "Before

you leave, just so you know, you forgot a piece."

Helen R. Peterson

### Ablaut

In the company cafeteria the man

murmurs a tune to his daughter,

alone except for a woman

reading a book by the window.

The toddler rings back the words

out of tune. He rocks the child,

diverts her attention to the tvs

the fact that they're all on CNN

makes her giggle.

He is relieved to quiet the song

until a photo of a child, newly dead

flashes on screen. "Look Daddy."

his daughter cries, attracted

as children are to people

their own age. "Yes, very pretty"

The father says, and rocks his child

"Isn't she a pretty girl?"

### Mageirocophobia

When grunions make their run to mate

the male sliding his body around the female, her tail

dug deep in the sand, they are unconcerned

about the parasites slipping between their scales

the scummiest of waters flowing through their open mouths

and seeping, filtered, from their gills. They don't know

salad bars are more likely to make a body sick than sushi,

or that Aunt Mae will someday scrape the mold from their bodies,

bury them deep in a tomb of batter, fry them crisp

in oil that will leap at her wattled arms.

Contributor Notes

 Jim Pascual Agustin writes and translates poetry in Filipino and English. He grew up in the Philippines and now lives in Cape Town with his Canadian-born wife and their twin daughters. His recent poetry books, Kalmot ng Pusa sa Tagiliran and Sound Before Water, were simultaneously published in 2013 by the University of Santo Tomas Publishing House in Manila. Due for release by USTPH is his new poetry collection, A Thousand Eyes.

 Jose A. Alcantara lives in Carbondale, Colorado. He started writing poetry four years ago after a quasi-mystical experience in a graveyard involving Dante, a dead woman named Guadalupe, melting frost, a raven, and some church bells. He was the recipient of a 2013 Fishtrap Fellowship in Poetry and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

 David A. Bart is a writer from Arlington, Texas. His poetry appears in the journals Poet Lore, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, Margie, Cider Press Review, Illya's Honey and The Weight of Addition (Mutabilis Press).

 Therese L. Broderick has spent many years serving her poetry community in Albany, New York, as an open-mic reader, teacher, contest judge, Board member, classroom guest, blogger, and Poet Laureate of a local tavern.

 Hannah Callahan was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, the youngest of four. She studied literature and printmaking at Bennington College in Vermont, and currently resides in Asheville, North Carolina. Hannah is a writer, collage artist, and extremely amateur thereminist. She is also the co-founder of falconswithcaps.tumblr.com. Her loftiest dream is to walk across country to Roswell, New Mexico to find a UFO.

 Monika Cassel is the English department chair at New Mexico School for the Arts, a statewide public arts high school in Santa Fe. With the support of the Lannan Foundation, she has developed a successful creative writing minor at the school. She is working on a manuscript of poems on her German family's WWII history; her translations of the poet Durs Grünbein are forthcoming in Asymptote and Structo Magazine.

 Kelsey Charles writes poetry and fiction whenever he can. But, of course, time is finite and always seems to be escaping him. He currently teaches English Writing and Public Speaking at Beijing Language and Culture University in China where he lives with his wife and daughter. Despite living in China for four years, he is still learning Chinese.

 Joey DeSantis is working towards an M. Ed. at Boston College and will soon be a high school English teacher, somewhere. Maybe one day he'll get that dream job writing for Nintendo. From substitute teaching to serving as a teaching assistant with KEYS Service Corps, AmeriCorps, working with youth makes his child at heart happy, as does writing poetry and listening to Bob Dylan.

 Lane Falcon's poems have been published in The Cortland Review, Rhino, Brain, Child Magazine, Pank, Word Riot, 2 River View and more. In 2012, she was awarded the Rona Jaffe Fellowship from The Vermont Studio Center. She lives in New York City.

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

 David Livingstone Fore is a designer and writer living in Oakland.

 Lisa Beth Fulgham is a recent graduate of Mississippi State University's M.A. program in creative writing and is the Managing/Founding Editor of Blinders Literary Journal. Currently, she is a wanderer and is working on submitting her chapbook, A Voice Raised From the Dirt. She is the former Associate Editor of The Jabberwock Review.

 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 lives in Seattle and drinks a lot of coffee.

 Raised on a vegetable and cattle farm in North Carolina, Sara Graybeal is a writer, spoken word performer and teaching artist living in Philadelphia. She is a founding member of the Poeticians, a spoken-word collective based in South Philly, and a member of the Backyard Writers' Fiction Workshop of West Philadelphia. Her work is published or forthcoming in Tempered Magazine, Apiary Magazine, the Head & the Hand Press, and Floating Bridge Review.

 Greg Grummer has been published in many small presses and periodicals, including Hunger, Rhino, APR, Ploughshares, Indiana Review, and more. He is a paper artist and teacher also.

 Tim Hawkins has lived and traveled widely, working as a journalist and teacher in international schools, among other positions. He currently lives in his hometown of Grand Rapids, Michigan. His writing has appeared in more than two dozen print and online publications, including the Summer 2013 issue of Sixfold. In 2012, he was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and published his first collection, Wanderings at Deadline (Aldrich Press). Find out more at: www.timhawkinspoetry.com

 Tee Iseminger is a recovering advertising copywriter returning to roots in fiction, with two novels and a short story collection in progress, and is experimenting with poetry—particularly narrative style. She's an alumni of Squaw Valley Writer's Workshops, Fishtrap Writer's Conference, Fine Arts Work Center's online workshops, and one day will finally finish her BA, 10 years in the making, at the University of Nevada's creative writing program. She lives with her husband and daughter in Reno.

 Lee Kisling is a senior at Hamline University in St Paul, Minnesota. In December 2013, his poetry chapbook The Lemon Bars of Parnassus was published by Parallel Press in Madison, Wisconsin.

 Originally from California, J. K. Kitchen is Associate Professor of Medieval History at the University of Alberta (Canada).

 James Leveque lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he is both a teacher and student at the University of Edinburgh, and where the city's energetic support of poetry has provoked much of his writing in this issue of Sixfold. He is originally from Fresno, California.

 Jessica M. Lockhart is from Selma, Alabama. She recently completed her MA studies at Mississippi State University, where she currently teaches English Composition.

 Rande Mack lives in Manhattan, MT. Sacajawea walked through his backyard long ago. Writing poetry is a way he makes sense of things, a way he prays. Some of his poems have appeared in a few small publications. He won a fellowship for his poetry from the Montana Arts Council.

 Mary Mills is a recent graduate of King University in Bristol, TN. She lives in Virginia, in a small town in the Appalachian Mountains, with her husband and their four birds. Her work has appeared in Shot Glass Journal, Four and Twenty, and The Clinch Mountain Review.

 Helen R. Peterson, from Eaton Rapids, Michigan, writes poetry and fiction and is coeditor of The Waterhouse Review. Melons and Memory, her first full-length book of poetry, was published in November 2011 from Little Red Tree Press. Her work has appeared in over 100 publications, both nationally and abroad, and she has read at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Out of the Blue Gallery in Cambridge, the Walt Whitman Homestead, and Rio's in Glasgow, Scotland, amongst others.

 Cameron Price is a poet living in Ann Arbor, MI. His poetry and experimental film work has appeared in Humble Pie and Small Po[r]tions, respectively. He is the design and visual art editor at Duende, a new online journal of art and literature.

 Anne Rankin-Kotchek is a freelance editor and writer. Her nonfiction has appeared in The Sun, The Mount Desert Islander, The Washington Post, and elsewhere. She graduated summa cum laude from Ohio State with a BA in English. Current projects include a book of poems, short stories, and a memoir. She cannot say enough good things about dogs, and, although an extreme introvert, she continues to build the tender, delicate bridges (she's certain) connect us all.

 Ricky Ray was born in Florida and educated at Columbia University. A non-dualist, he was once a garbage man, a functional bum, and a record label owner. In 2013, he received the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize, second-prize in the Whisper River Poetry Contest, and was a runner-up in the Georgetown Review Magazine Contest. He lives in NYC with his wife and three cats, where they dream of farm life in an undiscovered village.

 Phoebe Reeves earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College, and now teaches English at the University of Cincinnati's Clermont College, in Southern Ohio. Her poems have recently appeared in Versal, Third Coast, Quarterly West, and Memorious. Her manuscript, Helen of Bikini, was recently named as a finalist in the Sarabande Books Kathryn A. Morton Prize, and a semi-finalist in the Waywiser Press Anthony Hecht Prize.

 Daniel Stewart is the author of a collection of poems, The Imaginary World. Since 1999 he has been a teaching-writer for the Writers in the Schools. A variety of print and online publications have featured his poems, including Educe, Puerto Del Sol, Prairie Schooner, and Rattle. Recent work may be found in the anthologies REduce, and Thrush Poetry Journal: an anthology of the first two years.

 Abigail F. Taylor is a student of theology and history. She has had the honour of being previously published in Illya's Honey and Red River Review. She also served as Script Editor and Assistant to the Director to the gore black-comedy, The Dinosaur Experience (previously known as Raptor Ranch). She is currently working on her second novel and a chapbook.

 David Walker teaches English at both the high school and college level. He is the founding editor of Golden Walkman Magazine, and has poetry and fiction appearing in several literary magazines including Drunk Monkeys, Words Dance, and others. He has a chapbook forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. Living in Westfield with a hyperactive cat that puts holes in all his window screens, he is married to the love of his life, Caitlin.
