 
### Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013

by Sixfold

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors

www.sixfold.org

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

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

License Notes

Copyright 2013 Sixfold and The Authors. This issue may be reproduced, copied and distributed for non-commercial purposes, provided both Sixfold and the Author of any excerpt of this issue is acknowledged. Thank you for your support.

Sixfold

Garrett Doherty, Publisher

sixfold@sixfold.org

www.sixfold.org

(203) 491-0242

### Sixfold Poetry Fall 2013

Chris Joyner | Wrestlemania III & other poems

Carey Russell | Visiting Hours & other poems

Marc Pietrzykowski | Cabinet of Wonders & other poems

Jonathan Travelstead | Prayer of the K-12 & other poems

Jennifer Lowers Warren | Our Daughter's Skin & other poems

Jeff Burt | The Mapmaker's Legend & other poems

Patricia Percival | Giving in to What If & other poems

Toni Hanner | 1960—Lanny & other poems

Christopher Dulaney | Uncle & other poems

Suzanne Burns | Window Shopping & other poems

Katherine Smith | Mountain Lion & other poems

Peter Kent | Surliness in the Green Mountains & other poems

William Doreski | Gathering Sea Lavender & other poems

Huso Liszt | Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin... & other poems

Clifford Hill | How natural you are & other poems

R. G. Evans | Dungeoness & other poems

David Kann | Dead Reckoning & other poems

Ricky Ray | The Music of As Is & other poems

Tori Jane Quante | Creatio ex Materia & other poems

G. L. Morrison | Baba Yaga & other poems

Joe Freeman | In a Wood & other poems

George Longenecker | Bear Lake & other poems

Benjamin Dombroski | South of Paris & other poems

Ryan Kerr | Pulp & other poems

Josh Flaccavento | Glen Canyon Dam & other poems

Christine Stroud | Grandmother & other poems

Abraham Moore | Inadvertent Landscape & other poems

Chris Haug | Cow with Parasol & other poems

Mariah Blankenship | Fiberglass Madonna & other poems

Emily Hyland | The Hit & other poems

Sam Pittman | Growth Memory & other poems

Alex Linden | The Blues of In-Between & other poems

Bobby Lynn Taylor | Lift & other poems

D. Ellis Phelps | Five Poems

Alia Neaton | Cosmogony I & other poems

Elisa Albo | Each Day More & other poems

Noah B. Salamon | Sanctuary & other poems

Contributor Notes

### Chris Joyner

### Wrestlemania III

So much depends upon

a scoop slam, an atomic

leg drop. Hulk Hogan's shirt:

red wheelbarrow ripped open

as if by tornado or rust.

Jacked, his waxed skin

glazed with sweat, he is flexed

perfection. Bleached strands

worn like a bald-rimmed crown,

if ever he was apex, it is now:

all 7'5" 500 pounds of André the Giant

muscled impossibly overhead

like a mythological burden,

like Muybridge's mid-gallop,

airborne horse. Though too young

to have witnessed, I somehow remember

gripping rabbit ears, counting to three

as Hogan peeled back the Giant's leg.

I remember my father posing, partly

to me, partly to himself,

_What makes a man?_ but never

the answer. I am trying

to pretend I don't see the future

in his now slouching breasts,

or deeper inside slack flesh,

his heart hammering like a one-

armed carpenter worked too long

into the gloam. I am child again,

beside him under what relief

(I'd yet to fathom) a hot shower

bestows blue-collar bones.

Naked, I make lathering

grease from his hands

a game. Father, can I know

of love's inglorious sacrifices?

Can I someday sing of its gristle?

Can I? Can I sing?

### Hatred and Honey

Fledgling blunders, routine

tragedies, a dusk-bourbon sky

chasing us home. Suburbia—

what's salvageable:

this viewfinder of warped images?

Or rather, memory as a hose

untangled with coordination

and patience? Copper-sweet

water the spigot rewards?

Now the sour must of an office

where my uncle hid monolithic

stacks of skin magazines, all airbrushed

areolas and bush. When it seemed enough

to simply palm my flesh

like an injured chick. Flash

to swimsuit snatched below

my bony knees, prick a sudden

offering to the golden

lifeguard with Fibonacci curls.

How the yelp I mustered

before bolting sounded

not my own. A summer anthem,

shame became inescapable,

became like gravity

teaching the moon

to orbit alone.

So I lifted weights in our oily garage,

tore muscle like sacrament bread.

The friend I hated most once snapped

my hockey stick in half for no reason

other than cruelty craves reaction.

So too he set fire to a pine

in the neighboring woods;

I entered briefly to see it blaze—

a blood-red exclamation.

That was how it went: rarely living

between hatred and honey, not rebellious

but ignorant of consequence

until we witnessed how indifferent

and vibrant the flames, how surely,

when stepped on, a rusted nail

settles the soft meat.

This tender recess left

once the nail is loosed.

### Ode to Mosh

But for now, 17, we are

acned and beautiful, tornadic

in our angst. The venue's strobe-

dark striates our flail

neon/black/neon/black.

Lost in an undulation of knuckles

and chains, bedraggled bangs

and B.O., we are tossed—

paper lanterns in a storm—

slip, are lifted, return

to riffs clipping the beer-thick air,

kick drums pummeling our love

for the necessary rebellion

punk rock affords. After,

the lingering

sting in our ears we smuggle

home like anything good

that fades. But for now our bodies,

apertures through which

revolt and song, prism brilliantly—

solar flares through stained glass.

### Ode to Asymmetry

Bless the smaller, left breast, untethered, swimming

under faded cotton you wear to bed,

mattress begun to cup like hands

held out for the drizzle of our sleep.

Bless the 37 crumpled drafts of "Virtuvian Man"

Da Vinci, flustered, arced into his waste bin.

Drafts with one testicle slightly drooped,

one longer leg, six fingers, wonky eye.

Bless the crooked pocket sewn for pennies

in a country not quite our antipode. The unpredictable

course blood runs from a needle-nicked finger.

The unpredictable course by which cancer conquers,

finally, the dictator's lymph and marrow.

Bless the fractal crack of lightning,

its flighty refusal to lick the same ground.

The drunk man struck while scrawling

sloppily, with earnest into the oaks' flank

he hearts her—a declaration

to whichever sidereal big shot

rules over us but does not appear

to reward our psalms.

Which is not the way I feel for you now,

Honey-Bum, as you saunter braless, against

exhaustion, toward the commitment

of another dawn. Not asymmetrical, exactly, our love

but chiral, Icarian in its fluctuations. Not golden

our mean but a perfectly flawed stone

in a ring too small. This, the only way

I'd have it: waltzing off-beat,

mismatched,

mooching booze

at oblivion's dance party.

Carey Russell

### Visiting Hours

Let's build a tent of sweaters

and huddle like bullfrogs.

Come snuggle so close to me

you can hear my hair

chaff against your skull.

The sky is a dying violet

veined in silent oaks.

I leave you my voice

in nurses' footsteps climbing

up the white linoleum.

That and clean socks.

Almostleaves haze about these

late March branches. They candle

to green in the last reaches

of the sunset before winking out.

Is that what you thought

your death would look like?

I am still coming home

to your hanging shirts.

### Domestic

Through muscled roots, past black spring

soil, I buried your old dog.

Her old dog, you would say, watching him

search the house for her, hopeful,

her clothes still in the closet, hair still

in the brush. You still slept then

in linens embroidered in tight stitches,

her initials rising like scars. Now pale

ovals and rectangles hang where her

pictures had, shadows of those

boxed photographs you still avoid.

This is the season of her

dying. And deep into hard earth that scours

the shovel, I buried the dog.

### Egret

At the end of summer the egret stands

where the green reeds blacken

into deep. White and alone, velvet

he greets

cranberry vines

crumpling his gown then smoothing it.

His yellow metal eye,

layered by millions of years, the unbroken

clouds of a storm, and all

the weight that keeps You

from me and holds us to the earth.

Egret tell me you've met a god

so reckless that he will love

us all equally.

### After Hours

Clever sticks scratch the liver

spotted lake, the first green

unraveling. She is left.

Clouds cross her gaze

and a few unassembled stars.

How cold it is in this house.

These inescapable thoughts,

all that can and cannot be

healed, how and how long.

It is all still now, her vision

washed out. A history carved

in her feet and emptied space.

All night long the room shifts

to fit the absence. An act

of god could shake her,

a tremor in the earth

of her body and the stretch of

water so black it burns.

### Into the Valley

I returned home for this, an Appalachian

valley where once-green hills hold

the breath of the dead between them and lift

from each morning a fresh bandage

of mist. I watched the lowering, her coffin

rocking into the ground, a cradle

swaddled in gravel and dirt. Early fog sank in

so dense I could tear it like bread.

The gaze of the mourners followed me,

their eyes black scattering birds.

A fine ice dusted, silently silvered

my hair into my mother's.

Cupping my hands, I gathered cold globes

of breath, watched them whisper away.

Do the dead hold their mouths in their hands

like this to know what is left of them?

When I left, I took the valley with me,

the train slicing the fields, leaving

its stiff suture. She is survived by me.

Marc Pietrzykowski

### Cabinet of Wonders

Hefting Mrs. O out of bed required

a winch and a cradle of straps

and a hard ear: she cried, at least

more often than wailing, wordless,

the occasional bark. No wonder,

both hips were shattered, her spine

nearly a question mark.

So, her soft sobs were welcome

Tuesday morning, before bath,

and her sudden shrieks ignored,

at first, until we saw her fist

jabbing toward the floor: a small,

pink, heart-shaped box had fallen

and lay beside the bedpan.

Jamilla opened it, and up sprung

a tiny ballerina, en pointe,

pirouetting to Für Elise,

gears plinking slowly, slowly,

the song Mrs. O's sister practiced

forever, in the front parlor,

the sun colored vase of lilies

atop the piano, hair in a shaggy bun.

We all listened as it slowed

to a crawl, one note, one more,

then hung, unresolved, on the C.

Mrs. O didn't have to cry, Jamilla

turned the key before breathing,

let it play, let it wind down again,

then turned the key once more

to watch the ballerina twirl.

### I Am Glad I Have Seen Racehorses, Women, Mountains

I am glad I have seen racehorses, women, mountains,

glad I have sung, stretched my back, peeled skin from my sun-burnt arms;

I am grateful to have had a good enemy,

and to have fought, knowing there is no end to fighting.

There are few things to believe, and many things to know,

and they are all mixed up in a rusty can,

but when you are thirsty, even the rust

tastes of life. I am glad I have seen pumpkins, contortionists,

a mound of snow the size of a house; glad to have stunk a while

in the hole left by love, to have smiled

when an enemy was injured without reason,

to have realized there was a day the battle would end, for me.

There are tunnels and crevices beneath our feet, and weeds

springing up from between them, and beneath that, yes,

it is hot, but it is not a heat that concerns us, nothing human there,

though we may, given time, be ground down again into that molten sea.

### When This Plane Goes Down, I Want To Be Sitting Beside You

When this plane goes down, I want to be sitting beside you,

your hand atop mine, my hand resting on your thigh

when the air cracks in two and the oxygen masks drop

and the attendants float around the cabin like lost balloons,

the ones without enough helium to lose themselves in the sky,

when all the screams become one scream and we push it

behind us and start to fall, your hand atop mine, my hand

resting on your thigh, toward the trifling patchwork of farm

and park and baseball diamond, or toward the circuit board

of a city shivering. We can fall toward the men and women

who live as though the world is already burning, the ones

whom god has called to rise from this scabrous plain, or the ones

who sell their brothers and sisters daily to the mulch pile

for another chance at glory, no, not even glory, for another

chance to rule and power is the only rule, power grinds

mountains into dust and dust into fuel and fuel is the beast

that carries them into the fortress, locks the gates and pays

the mercenaries to walk the walls, it tints their sunglasses

and wraps the wires they stick in their ears. Or we could fall

toward the center of the ideogram, the heart of the advertisement,

the mainspring, the all-seeing eye, and pray for absorption

so, rather than die, we might multiply and occupy the other world,

the one we make with our bodies in space, the one that floats

up from our bodies like scent rising from a rose, the map

that we carry and share and inscribe together—but that is not

a life, yearning to be another stain on the wine-press, one more

palimpsest lurking on channel 132, 257, 308; instead,

let's just fall, your hand atop mine, my hand on your thigh,

and look at me so we might live each in the others' eye,

an infinite recursion of selves and eyes, each smiling the same,

each ringed with hair alive in the wind that strokes the earth.

### The Mower Obeys The Covenant

—after Marvell

The grass keeps on growing,

and I keep on mowing,

and then there's the room where I cry.

The carnivals come

and the cancer creeps up pantlegs

and lovers draw their curtains

and go about their days.

The grass keeps on growing,

and I keep on mowing,

and then there's the room where I cry.

I work, I follow the covenant;

I am a homeowner and a responsible

digit. If only they knew

how I longed for a sea of blood.

The grass keeps on growing,

and I keep on mowing,

and then there's the room where I cry.

Instead, the food court.

Instead, I watch the carousel

turning, a galaxy of fiberglass horses

collapsing too slow for the eye.

The grass keeps on growing,

and I keep on mowing,

and goddamn I wish I knew why.

Jonathan Travelstead

### Prayer of the K-12

Lord, let me start with one pull,

my bar shuddering in your calloused hand

as you ratchet my disc

to the scream that melts cast iron.

I pass through it, a ghost through rebar.

Chattery teeth, set on the floor and released.

On a house of cards, a tidal wave.

So much you have engineered, Lord.

I beg you let loose my chain

so with my carbide teeth

I can chew through the paper of this world.

_My god!_ let me do what you made me to do,

and growl beneath your trigger finger.

Let me tear this place in two.

### Prayer of the Maul

Let me sweep aside a factory wall, Lord,

cinder-blocks preventing passage

to an engine room scrolled in flame.

I am the grunt before thought.

My load is greater than your stamina,

and though I am your simplest machine

if you let yourself love too much

what is inside the mountain

I am sure to burst your colossal heart.

Even in my dreams

I am a juggernaut ready to destroy all things.

I pray only that you heft me

from that place between your shoulders.

Let me be the one chosen.

Jennifer Lowers Warren

### Our Daughter's Skin

He left for Tikrit when milk,

not language, was pooling

in our daughter's mouth.

A drowsy suckle.

He is prepared for saw-scaled vipers

and scorpions curled

in the toe of his no-shine boots

but not her dialogue.

She is sand skinned

and camel haired,

everything glistening.

He's seen the underside of baby shine,

dark grit, bodies turned inside out.

He knows her skin is just casing

and beautiful features are

just pieces, ground sausage.

Tightly packed.

Easily scattered.

### God's Hips

I have hips like God's.

Ample and unbroken,

a thick sway.

Children slopped out of me

and into cupped hands like

yolks slipping, shell to bowl.

God gave birth too,

oceans and continents crowning.

Stars fell from his strained divinity

like tears. He sweated light.

Thighs spread. Elasticity tested.

Omnipotence intact.

### Operation Iraqi Freedom

After an IED they search

and wager,

comparing body parts,

one against the other.

My husband finds the

biggest chunk—

five hundred for the face.

They favor circumference

over length.

### Eve Hitchhikes in Hawaii

I pick her up at Haleiwa Beach Park,

home to the North Shore hungry.

She carries a plastic bag

full of strawberry guavas

and three cigarettes,

half smoked and stubbed for later.

A conservationist.

She reaches into the backseat,

touches the inside of my daughter's ankle,

legs turned out in sleep.

She whispers,

"Soft like Abel, Cain's toes."

We talk about spearfishing

for Ulua and trapping the feral pigs

that rut along the ridgeline trails.

She leans deep into the floorboard

and pulls her shirt up,

showing me her coral scarred back.

Then rising with a smile,

crooks both arms against her body

as if still nursing

both brothers.

### Eve's Response

"Well I met him under the tree while Adam was wallowing

in his dreams of God and the grass.

I was bored, Adam was oblivious and He was handsome.

He tongued my innocence.

I was an eternity too young to know the difference

between the systematic tick on the clitoris

and the slow tap of someone knocking

against the wall of my heart.

I sucked syrupy mangos from his fingers and went back to Adam

with the juice still on my lips."

Jeff Burt

### The Mapmaker's Legend

Life cannot be limited to the Compass Rose

And the scale and the symbols of demarcation,

hues presenting heights of apprehension

and lows of depression, places to stop

and get off if only to wheeze, appreciate.

All the careful study of the distances and graphs

will not prepare one to travel, and cannot describe

the years spent dwelling in a single dot

desperate and willing to depart.

The sun's face in the center of the Rose

will not shine in the valleys of loneliness

you will run your fingers through

like an imaginary woman's long hair, who sat before you

and was gone before you could see her face.

Only the symbol for railroad tracks will be true,

the lines with crosses that look like stitches

that run up and down over all terrains

seemingly holding the map together,

closing wounds and scratches and leaving scars

of remembrance, your head cracked open

by an inadvertent elbow at school,

the glass imbedded in your palm

when you smashed the pane hearing cancer,

the bypass for your heart broken once too often

that meant you no longer wanted to love,

the second set of stitches for your heart

because you couldn't live without loving.

### Tribute for Phyllis

She punished the laundry, scraping the jeans of her boys

knuckles white against the washboard

flapped and snapped dishtowels and rags like a randy bully

in the high school shower against the butt of the basin

and clipped the clothespins with revenge to hold the sheets

that had been bleached and softened and breeze dried.

She could make shirts weep and undershirts cry

and boxers mourn as they pinned on the line.

Disease flew from her ferocity, and comfort came

when she'd hold the swaddling clothes to her nose

and sniff and smile as if something holy had taken place.

When she walked down the river the rocks remembered

and the riprap still murmurs her praise.

### History

The Greeks would jump and dance about

mawkish-faced and freaks afoot,

and Prospero the Roman had an ugly face

scourged by smallpox and missing an ear,

so was a natural for amusement between acts of play.

But Prospero the Roman had seen an egret

from the Nile stand on one leg peering into water

then slowly trade its balance to the other,

so in his pantomime he played the bird

to which crowds booed and threw things at him,

but several asked for a private performance,

so he followed storks and cranes in landings

and takings off, the slow circling head of a female swan

as she knew her young had died,

the nightingale with upturned throat

that sang until its voice exhausted,

and when his time for performance came

he mimicked the storks and cranes,

and did the egret to murmurs of appreciation,

and the crowd was pleased, left gasping,

and for his finale performed the nightingale in song

by stretching his neck upwards as if to God

with his arms like wings forcing out the last of his breath,

then the circling of the swan

with his body, and left the audience hushed.

When he performed before the Emperor,

with executions and maulings of slaves on the fare,

he was whisked off stage after the act

and banished for life to a quarry outside of Rome.

But a thousand girls had the seen the mime,

and when brushing hair they would stand on one foot,

when walking down stairs would hold out their arms

as if cranes landing in a field, when imagining a lover

would strain their neck and appeal to God,

and when unrequited, slowly circle to the ground.

### The Lost Pilot

Nestled in the far distances

my imagination had roamed

in the nether land,

still I am near to and nearing my home.

Frieda, my grandmotherly neighbor,

waves me in, the lost pilot

returning from the army air corps.

Yet after the fantasy recedes

its repercussions linger:

I step over a fence

and it rapidly disappears,

the steadily burgeoning sun

wades through formidable leaves,

air widens, and twilight shadows

fly over drought-shrivelled grass.

The paint on a primitive church shines

pudgy and white,

billowing like a parachute.

I smile, listen:

the wood is not laughing.

In the dry hot wind button-black susans

tango and rock,

dust waltzes

to unheard-of music, Frieda's wave

a metronome of my heart.

With each thing both fanciful

and real, how flat the imagining man,

a solid body with spirit

which cannot by any artifice

detach itself from flesh

and vanish in a vaporous ascension

to the promise of joy.

How, when we can believe

all the feather, bone

and beak of our existence was born

of a central egg, can

we not set the mind skyward,

free in its flight?

Like gravity the daily routines

pull down magnificent creations,

and it is one continuum

between fancy and fact,

the two ends of the pole

with which we balance

unaware of any safety net,

the tipping of one end too high

sure to flip us off the wire.

So I feel: it is hot.

While there are no limits

to the distance a dream may take,

the clock of my body yanks

me back to the small seam

of time I continually try

to rip—a far journey

in a short span.

And though reentry

to the war-torn fortress

of a common world is loss,

an unshielded burning,

the greater intensity

of rapid associations

reduced to a linear conversation,

it is the condensation,

the subsequent recalling

of the imagined event

which makes the fantasy desired.

The ether I once was

vanishes, and I reappear

glistening and whole, joy

rising to the surface of my face,

death and logic submersing

to become a sediment

from which I can only toss and swell above.

I am liquid, a lake,

and the trickle from the hose

is a river replenishing

my arid head,

and a beer is the storm

dousing the kiln

of my thinning throat.

### Three Threads

In Mason jars the machine, the wood, the metal,

the button-head, slotted, crossed,

whorled, knurled, tipped to explode, bound,

locked, washered, starred, bolted, nutted,

used, saved, reclaimed from rust.

All these threads, mechanical stitches,

filling punched, drilled holes

to keep the world from falling apart.

I have not found a fastener

for the hole since you've departed.

Patricia Percival

### Giving in to What If

after Steve Scafidi

If I only wrote about what I knew, as once

Plath wrote of moons, mannequins,

and the grievous words of yew and elm—

I would tell of the last call my brother made,

when he said he wouldn't come for Christmas

and I tried to change his mind, and he insisted,

and I had the flu and didn't, maybe, hear

the tone of his voice. Or I'd only write

of diapers, cakes baked, and failed tomatoes,

or of fees simple, encumbered and joint.

But I prefer to imagine life

in the animal kingdom, where,

as I understand it,

they get by without what ifs.

Here I can drift, a sea turtle

on ocean currents, weightless

from Thailand to the Golden Isles,

and not once consider

the half-ton of gravity

I bore across the sand

at nesting time, and will again,

when the moon draws me ashore.

As a crane I'm blessed with a mate

who chose me for life and is happy,

who doesn't brood about the crane

one creek over, the one with plumper knobs

on her knees, knobs he'd like

the other males to envy

during annual migration.

I am a crow, immersed

in the collective mind of the murder,

and when the phone rings

someone, at least one of us,

has heard that tone of voice before,

remembers the up-shot, and tells me,

_your brother needs help_.

Go now.

### Waiting for the Good Humor Man

Houston, 1962

Prone beneath mimosas,

the picture-book God

of rules and hellfire

deferred to the grace

of the natural world.

Pompons rained on me,

already dazed

by the scent of heat

rising off asphalt,

the smell visible

as a mirage

in a foreign legion film.

And though I don't believe

my catechism, as I did then,

I've kept my eyes open to visions,

mild thunderbolts which saints

might call the voice of God:

After a storm, starfish

littered the beach at Sanibel,

hundreds of six-armed bodies

expelled from the deep.

And fifty years ago, I saw

lilies of the valley emerge,

pristine, from the charnel

of rotten leaves.

### Prescription for the Use of Scottish Footwear

When you hike, wear heavy socks and brogues,

so your eyes may rise above the narrow path,

ignore the common gait, trust one foot

to find its place before the other.

Toes safe, scan the landscape for love.

Stride through fields of waist-high grass,

fodder before it's scythed to bale, and borrow

a few stalks to carry. The world's in hand—

food for winter, seeds of next year's crop.

Kick a pinecone straight down a gravel road,

on parade for crowds of spiderwort

and sumac cheering from the ditch. Notice

that suitors vie for your attention:

the eager moon, risen early into sheer sky

and the sun boasting in scarlet and plum.

Write your name on the bones

of the old smokehouse, to tie you

to the past, and keep a fragment

in the pocket of your winter coat, a gift

to find each year. At night, in the warmth

of your fireside, pick burrs from your socks

and burn them. Listen to your problems pop

and sizzle. Savor their resinous smell.

Watch them curl to cashmere smoke.

### Birds of Suburbia: Blue-Gray Heron

Misplaced here by the interstate,

you soar above Baskin-Robbins,

sapling legs sailing behind,

neck folded into blades

of Da Vinci wings,

his dream of flight.

From here you wear no blue,

your silhouette all shade

glued flat to an ochre sky.

In this landscape of Starbucks,

your exotic form drags behind

a rusty tin can of foreboding.

Where are your moss-draped oaks?

I rejoice each spring and fall

when our house is a stop on your route,

like Sweat's bar-b-q in Soperton

for Atlantans en route to Savannah.

I look out the west window

and there you are

a gawky Giacometti

knob-kneed and statue-still.

Perched on the brick ledge

or one leg submerged

you eye the buffet:

former denizens of our fishbowl

and offspring of bream

pulled from Nancy Creek

by children on summer break.

Then I see your slate spectrum flash.

You're welcome here, eat up.

The goldfish translate sun too,

but are more prolific, their design

less esoteric, less like a secret

whispered in Genesis.

### Losing My Drift

In line for coffee, waiting my turn,

a song transports me back.

Joni Mitchell just released _Hejira,_ and I race

down _the fine white lines of the free, free way._

I'm vaguely aware that what other patrons see

is a middle-aged woman, spaced out in Starbucks,

her hair in disarray, atypical of the neighborhood.

She seems to think it's her duty to explain the draft

and women's lib to young people who missed the Sixties,

these young people who seem to be running everything

(when did they take over?)

I don't know this woman, but she's always around.

Easily distracted, she has binges of attention,

interrupts everything she does to start

something else, keeps piles in every room,

monuments to projects she means to finish.

One pile on her desk is for vanishing wetlands,

one for stupid real estate projects

she will deplore in letters to editors

(Joni was right about that _tree museum_ ),

and one of unfiled items for her garden notebook,

data about plants that died years ago.

One pile is for an essay on hypocrisy.

The same politicians against stem cell research

say _bombs away_ at the drop of a hat, unbothered by thousands

of dead civilians. Frankly, she just wants to slap

her friends who voted to keep them in office and say, _WISE UP!_

At this point it's obvious the disgruntled boomer

has taken control of this poem that was supposed to be

about the grad student who stood atop Balsam Mountain

decades ago and thought society was progressing.

I was going to write about the self, or selves,

about how what seems lost, isn't.

But the self that soars over the valley like a Red Tail

is also the slippery fish, still shining,

but scarred from flopping in the bottom

of an old canoe, which is the body, I guess,

and it's drifting down stream, heading for the falls.

Toni Hanner

### 1960—Lanny

When I touched Lanny's arm, up where her white sleeve

ended, there were bees humming beneath her warm skin.

When I smelled Lanny's hair, her straightened hair

the dull black of asphalt, it was sweet, just on the edge of turning.

When I touched Lanny's hair, smoothed my hand

over the rough surface so unlike my own black silk—

Lanny's skin the color of Sanka in the jar, a stone

hot in the sun, flecks of glistening fool's gold.

We took off our clothes and lay giggling in her bed.

We hid her brother's magazines under the covers

and marveled at the pale women, their enormous breasts,

and marveled at each other's flat chests,

her little buttons a color I had no name for.

I remember talking dirty, biting the pillows to keep

from screaming with laughter and something else. We had no idea

what any of it meant, all I knew was that I wanted my arms

around her thin little body I wanted to lie on top of her

with my face in the sweaty hollow between her neck and bony

shoulder, I wanted a world I would not learn

how to name until Lanny disappeared.

### Catalina

for Gloria

How did we decide—you nodded right or left,

I followed. Did we tell our parents—how

did we get there neither of us

had a car or a license. In the photo we sit smoking

on a blanket on what must be a beach

although you can't see the ocean—maybe

it's a hotel swimming pool. Bikinis, my sly, shy

almond eyes. Your mouth prim, your body

already hatching your future. Seniors in high school,

college freshmen, I remember nothing

but being there, Catalina, _26 miles across the sea_ ,

the Avalon Ballroom's graceful decay lording it over

daytrippers like us. We took a rickshaw,

night came with the usual terrors. You

went out on a boat with a stranger,

he had a yacht or was pretending to be

a man with a yacht. I don't remember where

I slept or how we got home. Just this photo,

smoke from my Lucky

a curtain drawn across my face.

### On Funerals

Over the land bridge to Idaho,

when my father died we didn't

it's how the Eskimos got there

and the Portuguese, my aunt's

family, rows of Berriochoas

in Shoshone, animate as dust

swirling above ground, but when

my father died we just went home.

Africa, the Great Wall, we re-hung

the wallpaper in the corner cathedral,

we swept up the dust from Chernobyl

and fed each other with eyedroppers.

Now they come so fast, it's hard

to keep track, my brother my sister

eventual only eighty years ago, now ellipses

in my mother's autobiography. Oh yes,

she started it, my mother, with her June

snowfall, the monks gathering in their yellow,

her purple bruises, her flesh too yielding,

as if she were melting there in the salt flats

now each flies off after her, massive wing-beats,

we are already forgotten.

### Boxes

Sister, here is your box, it has no stairs.

I will take you out when I need a slide

rule, a compass. Brother, your box

is tall, you will need to stand. If you grow

tired, ring the bell and someone will come

to turn you onto your side.

If you see our father

please tell him his supper

is getting cold.

### After Dreams of the Dead All Night, My Father

I wake late, bones aching and stiff.

A busy night of dead sisters

and living sibyls, a mother

somewhere, stirring the pot.

My ignorant calendar tells me

to send my brother a birthday card.

He'd be 76 on Wednesday, catching up

with our sister, now both are ash. I bought

tiny cork-stoppered bottles, thinking to collect

everyone, line them up on the mantle,

now I'm not so sure, I have my father, maybe

he's all I need, my blood,

my horse, shambling through family

in a flail, a smolder. The parentheses around

my father and me raising the hair

on the back of my neck, I conjure him,

he strides hobble-gaited through all the watchkeepers,

they can't see him and if they did, he'd seem a fool.

Inside the pale gold glass, ash sticks

together, wanting to hold some form.

Christopher Dulaney

### Uncle

They found him on his face in a motel room

where he paid rent with his hands, painting walls

and cutting lawn, keeping things up—

There were notes on the upright

that I could not play,

keys that would not sound.

You were afraid of his hands. You all were,

as if they had buried a part of you,

deep enough, you all had thought;

until it came time to bury him,

his death in your minds

like water too hot for the skin.

It was still morning and you were all old

and thinking the same things—

just as helpless as you were then,

those nights when you were young

and he, deaf drunk, found you

cold and still and silent

There were notes on the upright

that I could not play,

keys that would not sound.

It was me who held his cold hands

who straightened his curled fingers

so that they could lie flat like the rest of him,

crying like the rest of the room,

thinking of how

you were only girls then and already

full of feelings without names;

left with the ugliness of his touch,

the blame of his hands:

as if they had buried a part of you,

deep enough, you had thought—

there were moments in the night,

in your night—

They were notes on the upright

that I could not play,

keys that would not sound.

### Somehow, Distance Becomes A Bosom I am Gawking At

Today I walked to work with a Steinbeckian tractor for a heart,

a dust covered machine lurching towards the Bethlehem behind my eyelids,

overworked from plowing the cropless field of our love. I am stuck in oscillation

between honesty and victimhood, searching myself over for a wound.

I turn around to spot no trail of blood or chain and ball—I yield only a sense, a memory

slipping in and out of focus: Wrongness.

I woke today from a dream of Krishna dancing with his gopis,

my dream self juggling a blue desire to be recognized, to be collected

into the arms of God, to be seen dancing,

chanting the Maha Mantra with my eyes closed

out on my permanent lunch break.

But these wrongs, even renouncement can't smother:

the injuries acquiesced along the curves and protrusions of togetherness—

the yo-yoing of the heart, the titter tatter of my brain—

my hands

always in your braids,

fucking them up. In the dream, Krishna laughs as I approach him,

and his laugh is an ocean, electric with death, darkened by sex. I am embarrassed.

Ashamed of the limits of my love for you,

guilty for pretending they could be any less severe,

for never taking my eyes off the distance I would place between us.

In another dream, you were the turtle crossing the road

that I didn't swerve to miss,

that I told myself

I had only nicked.

### Unsearchable

"The heart is deceitful above all things,

& desperately wicked: who can know it?"

—Jeremiah 17:9

If I open it up to find it bare,

unadorned with the sap of experience,

beating fast, (though I'm breathing slow),

I find its red almost insolent, the way it's

both bright and pale, shimmering and dark,

the way it wavers but doesn't fall, like

infrastructure made with the earth in mind.

As if we are children playing on staircases,

faced with the peril of the questions we

didn't think to ask, or else older, grown and

always mesmerized by the consequences

we seem to escape; dogged with the trouble

of looking out and only seeing our wide-eyed selves.

I start to think of light as the first

and most elegant fiction refracted by what

is really there: a parched desert bush, a fruit tree

by a stream, my hand as I reach out to touch you,

always and forever wishing that each time I do

really is _the good flesh continuing_.

I am aware that I shouldn't trust it,

that it is not mine to search—

but here, with you, beneath this blanket

of coalescent days, perhaps I am

folding into the thing of it now,

perhaps I am catching on.

### Fever in My Pocket

Up until now I'd lost it, that tune you'd hum between A and B,

us alone and on foot, our stomachs ruined with an idea:

the difference between wisdom and ignorance,

between how the two make you act.

How you'd known all the ways to keep me out,

and yet neither of us knew when to let me in,

nor did we guess that when you did it would

do nothing for our stomachs. Even months later,

with you off for summer, the light still

pours through the hole in the window above

the sink from the last time you sent me home.

Alone in my kitchen,

I shake the thought of us around in my head

like a riff from _Exile_

_on Mainstreet_ or a lyric

from _Blonde on Blonde_ ,

how the one bleeds

helplessly into the other,

how a plea is a plea

and every time the a/c clicks on or off

I hear myself singing

— _come, come on down Sweet_

_Virginia—_

— _because sometimes it gets so hard_

_you see?_

Because someone once taught me that flour

doesn't rise unless you've remembered to sift it first,

and like your dress on so many of those dead note

nights, I am afraid we are not self-rising.

There's a difference between someone you've fallen

mad for and a lonely pool of light,

but I don't think I've found it.

### Skipping to the Back of the Qur'an

I.

With hardship comes ease

_with hardship comes ease_

Twice it reads

and I think

practice

practice

practice

Earlier

I read

as sure as rain as grass is green

this is a discerning recitation

_not a flippant jest_

II.

There is an image of denial

as men reclining in mirth

and as I read of their damned fate

I am afraid

I myself

am too in love with distraction

At times

these old recitations

are less words on a page

and more the coarse

whistle of wind eroding rock

the only cruelty of God is time

III.

A garden and a river

and always a cup of nectar in your hand

hatred

and

injury

removed from your breast

the blind are not

_the same as the seeing_

God

be gentle for a while

do not leave me alone to my pleasure

Suzanne Burns

### Window Shopping

Whether or not we ordered the same cup of coffee

in two different ways or punctured the skin

of a ripened fig with two separate nails

to unlock the jewels clasped inside,

on that Saturday afternoon in late March

we loved each other over the forced majesty

of charcuterie plates wondering where their hearts went,

valentines even the sort of people

who talk about eating kumquats,

standing in line to buy kumquats, leave behind,

always excusing life's bloody things.

The butcher tells us on Tuesdays he slices open a pig,

unfurling a roll of pink silk to expose the puzzle beneath.

The Sturm und Drang of his tattoos pitch and yaw

as he sharpens a knife I imagine plunging into you

in front of that Sylvia Plath mural we passed.

I once saw a bell jar descend over a village scene,

Swiss Christmas, reindeer lawn, ribbon candy

tripping on its own psychedelic stripes.

You replaced my dream of either skiing the Alps

or becoming the next Sylvia Plath,

who even wanted to die each spring, forgetting

how with Ted Hughes at Court Green

she once churned among the butter of daffodils.

You never need to pick me flowers or write poems

when your close body makes me forget my words

and what happened to all the boys in school

who thought kumquats were obscene

and W.C. Fields beckoning his "little kumquat"

to him, the newest and youngest blonde girl

unlocking more puzzles on the silver screen

while I wait to cut open and climb inside of you.

It is more than wanting to know your view of things,

what you stand in line to eat,

how to erase the times you shared crackers and cheese

in another woman's picnic scene,

how she understood the provenance of gourmet eating

while miles away from both of you

I sharpened the edge of my lonely knife

and waited to start the kind of romance

that does not need a plate of figs and honey

or you dipping a finger in her empty wine glass

to mark that one sweet spot that will never wash clean.

### Having a Gelato with You

is maybe what Frank O'Hara really meant

because these years sitting across from you

have made me rupture with presumptuousness.

People like summer because for a few months

they no longer smell death tying itself into their shoes.

The busses run without incident. People say,

Well, Goddamn! only to compliment a perfected belly flop

or the way daisies press themselves between novel pages

like Prom corsages, if Prom meant watching bugs

line up on picnic blankets, that forgotten smear of deviled egg

harnessing enough good cheer to last until winter.

I love to kiss you until I forget winter exists.

Even your tongue, cold from scoops

of pistachio or spearmint, asks me

to mouth the words, "summer dress."

I want you to follow me to our hotel like we just met

and there will never be anything on television

better than watching me brush my teeth

and be extra quiet when I spit.

Having a gelato with you lets me catalog the way

your eyebrows scuttle across your face but never overlap.

You order steaks with that red ribbon middle,

turning blood into a gift more than a predicament.

I want to memorize each of your innumerable facts.

You like museums, so I pretend to like museums

though even in Paris they seemed nothing but dead.

Around you I am glad the way kids are glad

the Easter bunny never forgets cheap candy

tastes better hidden in grass and Mona Lisa

looks better in photographs. Having a gelato with you

is a portrait with your tiny spoon and cup.

Is this how you looked as a baby? I never think about babies

unless I am around your pinked coin face.

I swallow chocolate and wish you could have seen me

once stalk these streets in my plaid 90's dress

when ice cream meant a cherry on top,

the girl from Twin Peaks who could tie the stem in a knot

and make everyone dream of her snowy skin,

even in summer when the Portland boys got me alone,

disappointed my tongue never learned that trick.

Having a gelato with you is knowing you will say

all the things even men in fairytales forget.

It is okay if your feet are too big.

Who needs that stupid glass shoe?

Having a gelato with you makes me want to call you art.

No museum means more, though I know

what you will say when we seer lilies behind our eyes,

our impressions of sloppy, waterlogged stars,

that French Braille of paint.

Before we met I sat on a bench in front of my first Monet

and held my breath. I can't remember if I really cried

at all that blue like I said,

but having a gelato with you makes me understand

that if we opened our eyes at the very same time

there would be something more than tears.

### Room Service

I have never asked if your wife knows

how we always order dessert,

concoctions of chocolate or caramel,

butterflied sponge cake cut soft on the bias

yielding to the urgency of your mouth

the way I imagine you unzipping my dress with your teeth.

I wonder if I might tell you, in the hotel above where we sit,

to use your hands instead,

that a husband and a father is not meant

to follow me upstairs like the beginning of a foreign film

where the leading man is really a woman

and the flowers symbolize anything but flowers.

No one knows how I once danced with a man upstairs,

a party in a suite, both of us moving closer

than when lovers joke about being _thisclose_ ,

my summer dress breezing around his body,

heat steaming between my legs as if something inside me

insisted he knew it was there, how I only said yes

because there was no one to sing along to Black Sabbath

playing on the radio in the next room,

the man never guessing me for a fan

and having no time to love me or the flower pinned in my hair

as I pretended to be some other kind of woman

who would never bake cupcakes for a birthday.

I doubt what you say about staying loyal to your home base

and hope no man ever describes me as a baseball cliché

while a waiter glides past us with crème brulee,

a room service tray meant to entice other diners

away from their husbands and wives.

I have ordered room service with boys

who liked to watch porn and eat sushi off my thighs

and men who designed sugar as foreplay,

a crescendo of spoons eternally tapping for that one sweet spot.

I could have almost loved you if we ate lunch outside,

this time our hands butterflying each other

as we wonder what will come of the day,

the thought of spending time with crème brulee

no more delicious than buying an old record from the store next door,

a former hard rock anthem blazed on its sleeve

as we remember how it feels getting to first base,

that rocketing red glare before we grow old enough

to need secret sugar off a tray,

that edible Cinderella shoe,

to find each other even a little bit charming.

### The Light in Your Kitchen Window

You do not know I am standing out here

like something, for once, that belongs in the dark.

I am not afraid of an errant zombie

lost and looking for brains

or the kind of man who collects fingers in a box,

breath catching the way it does

on the biggest and best carnival ride

at the thought of cutting off the tips

where my composed shadows play against your front walk.

There is a circus in my heart for you.

What I mean is more than the roar of a lonely woman

masquerading as a ghost beneath the streetlight.

You have tried many times to turn me

into your own private ghost

by the way you keep your lips closed now when we kiss,

and how we never kiss,

and how you dropped my nickname somewhere out back,

but this sideshow we exist in is still filled with hope.

There is cotton candy there, too,

electric pink dross of good dreams

before all we did was go around saying,

or refusing to say, _I'm sorry._

We have washed and dried dishes in the same sink

so this is nothing to shut your blinds to,

the way I wave before you go to the bed

I have loved you in and out of too many times

to keep hidden in my own special box.

I am standing outside your window

watching you water plants, make tomorrow's sandwich,

force yourself not to wave back.

I mean the kind of sorry that might sound better

translated into the private language we once spoke

when we liked the same movies we hadn't even seen,

Laurel and Hardy and that piano

negotiating their thirty-nine steps

onto a list of favorites we meant to sip hot chocolate to,

some certain look shared between us

no other certain looks could compete with.

The look that keeps me anchored in front of your window

long after the lights go out,

long after you tuck yourself in

by negotiating your body to turn from where I once slept,

somehow a little afraid of what will happen next.

### The Last Supper

Even the day before Christmas

they bring a slice of lime on a saucer

to float in my Diet Coke like we are celebrating.

The next table over cracks walnuts,

reveals blue veins with their cheese knives

and I wonder if they are also pretending

their brother is still alive.

I want to say, Wait, this is specific.

We are different the way everyone thinks they are different.

Someone orders wine. I can never taste

the chocolate or the leather and wonder

if the aged oak barrel looks like the cartoon

of a man jumping over Niagara Falls.

Those suspenders must save him every time.

To create the illusion of appetite before dinner

we walked past all the downtown mannequins

I once starved myself to look like.

Now we spend too much on steak and lobster

and order dessert in our brother's honor

that everyone just pushes around on their plates.

Sometimes nights in Portland feel customized for pleasure.

Midnight dirty snowball donut runs, pretending

to get married at The Church of Elvis, 1991,

when everyone good was still alive, like Kelly

and Kurt Cobain and Paul Newman and your mother.

The moments when staring at a bridge reveals

something more than wanting to jump over.

This not one of those nights.

I was reading a book about JFK Jr.'s plane crash

the night you died. This fact feels important,

like how I used to fantasize about watching

the Macy's Thanksgiving parade with John-John

in the secret window of a penthouse

lined with his mother's first editions

and his father's ghost to avenge like our very own Hamlet.

I have never been drunk enough or religious enough

to see a ghost but now look for signs everywhere,

poking my head in Cameron's Books

to flip through yellow tabloids and wait for a sign.

Something simple, like "Yours til Niagara Falls."

There doesn't need to be a barrel. Maybe a recipe book

because in the life we are still stuck in you once cooked

a chicken dish that made me like eating chicken again.

I never thought I would run out of time to tell you

I really liked the way you cooked chicken.

I don't understand signs enough to know

if that old People magazine photo crumbling

in my hands of John Jr. and Carolyn

when they were still the Kennedys our mothers

ran out of time to pin their next hopes on

was a message about how death meets

older brothers and East Hampton blondes evenly.

Maybe the nights made for pleasure

are the only nights we should remember.

How another brother made sure our waiter

understood the way I like my steak

then told me when it came to not be afraid

of a final toast followed by a first cut

and the tiny bit of blood left dazzling

my clean white plate.

Katherine Smith

### Mountain Lion

Nothing human's in that sky,

like a room where guests aren't welcome

no radio towers or electric wires,

and even the planes fly parallel to highway eighty-one

fifty miles to the west or turn east

north of here and fly to Richmond.

Just a few hawks circle the blue.

She eats a bite of the apple she took with her

and walks the gravel road to the ridge,

brushes her hair from her face and smiles

a habit like the sympathy she offers the mountain.

If she's quiet she'll see the deer in the undergrowth,

and once she saw a brown bear and cubs.

These hours when there's no one to civilize her,

to put _her_ in the proper perspective

she often imagines what she might say to the mountain,

how she'd advise it not to take too personally,

the dynamite and the quarry,

how she'd point to the example of the bear,

dung bright with purple berries,

its misunderstood subjectivity; to the deer's

flighty point of view; to the wild wheat

harvested from the hillside,

its ingratitude at being found;

to the scrub pine that has taken root

while she was gone all autumn, green needles

bright with toxic gasses sucked from the wide blue sky.

But she knows if the mountain could

it wouldn't offer brilliant arguments

but lift itself from golden haunches and leap.

### Navel Orange

Audrey hates to bring in the groceries,

to struggle in through the side door, arms full

after the ease of plucking food like costumes

from a rich wardrobe: crushed velvet of coffee beans,

chains of barley, couscous, wheat-berries, grains

of edible gold. She harvests from the aisles

the silks of ruby red chard, of collard greens.

But then she has to get it all home.

It is—like the friends and lovers

with whom she once packed her mind,

their ruffled shadows, satin mysteries

all there for the choosing—too gorgeous.

No one told her of the difficulties of storage.

Once home the paper grocery bags, dampened,

split open, spilling fruit. Ripe cantaloupe

with its fragrance of sugar and garbage,

the lover with his belly, his suits, his job

at the financial corporation, a marriage

that haunted him, and four sweet children.

The voluminous sugars had to fit

somewhere. Only like the melon

they didn't. It has taken years to decipher,

to learn to steadily unpack

the navel oranges exactly as they sit

on the table, to draw the precise distance

between the two pieces of citrus,

how light catches the pebbled flesh,

the flecks of shadow that fall

into miniscule valleys, the lamplight

that dazzles one pole of fruit bursting

with miniature oranges tucked into the globe

of larger fruit, the midnight that darkens the other.

### Bridge

In her dream her son is dead.

Candy cannot call his name

as she once did when,

four, he opened the iron gate

at the park in Paris, careened down the hill

past the waffle seller and the black swan

toward the boulevard, cafes, gleaming cars.

That was before she learned the names

of machines she can now forget: Renault,

Audi, Toyota Chevrolet, GM, Volvo.

She can forget the spelling rules,

the multiplication tables, the names

and dates of all the presidents of the USA,

the names of girls.

None of them will do any good.

And then it is morning.

He is twenty-one. Candy doesn't know

where he is, not exactly

though certainly he is in America,

probably in a car, and she—

surrounded by fog rising from the pines trees,

from the hemlock, from the James river,

from the Shenandoah mountains—

taking her coffee down to the water

hears a single engine in the distance.

One rusty pick-up truck approaches

with farm tags on the gravel road.

A hand flies up and waves to her

and moves past her where she stands on the bridge

in the only location she knows for sure.

### Expedition

Audrey shuts the book on Shackleton,

the photos of his men: playing soccer in snow,

the Endurance foundered in blocks of ice

beyond them; gathered around the fire

on Elephant Island, their weathered faces

lit with wonder as they listen to stories

waiting for the rescue team;

petting the stripped tabby cat

that Shackleton finally shot

after calling it a weakling.

She would have been the cat

Audrey thinks worrying about the daughter

she raised alone, who careens

on the slick back roads of America

in her Japanese car. She rises from the couch

throws aside the weight of quilts

to choose the spices from the carousel

on the dining room table, soothed by

the tiny achievement of the small

wooden spoon in its bowl of salt,

the four ounce canister of tandoori spice,

glass bottles of whole black peppercorns,

cinnamon, nutmeg. She stands at the center

of a rag rug woven into a labyrinth of sienna,

green and blue, boiling the collard greens,

soy paste and tofu. Her daughter sings hello

as she arrives, elegant and oblivious,

from the storm, pets the purring tabby

that sleeps at the head of the table.

### Satisfaction

Not forgetting of course rising from the body that once thrilled you

with the same delight you now recognize in golden retrievers chasing Frisbees

or calves born at the penultimate day of spring frisking in pastures

carpeted with blue violets, lime colored grasses, dandelions like helium balloons.

Glittering space shuttles land safely in limpid blue oceans like transparent silks.

The heroic astronauts resume the paperwork of their everyday lives

to a tedious fanfare. The golden puppy now sleeps half the day.

The toddler bites into the velvety pink Easter egg to discover salt.

Friendships once fields of sweet clover, gone stale,

weigh down your body like moldy hay bales left in the rain.

What do you do with entire continents of disappointment

once exhausted by the early rages?

John Cage said if something is boring for five minutes

do it for ten, if boring for ten do it for twenty, if it is boring for twenty,

do it an hour, and so on for eternity. I think he had an answer

to cherry blossoms after the spectacular show and the heartrending petal fall.

Peter Kent

### Surliness in the Green Mountains

I like to complain

about too little steamed milk

in coffee. And ill-timed

cloud cover stripping the blue face

off the ocean. I know

I'm fortunate. No cancerous calamity

has found me. No car crash

has maimed me. Pulling away

from the drive-through, my drink's too hot

to taste, to judge. I turn

the wheel toward the hem

of mountains, where clouds press

like sour insistence: I have a duty

to attend, a funeral for a colleague's father.

It will cost me

two of the days I've rented the house

on the cove for a holiday—a holiday

to still the flurry of a life that feels

like coins spilling to the pavement

through a hole in my pant's pocket.

I should have gone to Jamaica.

Someplace beyond obligation's

reach. A foreign paradise,

blinged by palms and voices

redolent, familiar, but off kilter.

It helps to get places

where traffic lights seem superfluous

as they do in Montpelier. Though,

I often stand before travel books

on Budapest—petulant and wishing

to be swallowed by its pandemonium.

Cities are survival's hallmarks.

Slaughter and roast everyone

rooted in them, and they rebound,

resilient as Vermont maples after winter.

This beleaguered Toyota

doesn't like the climb—its four cylinders

wheezing, coaxing combustion

to reach another summit.

The service will be in the same chapel

where my colleague was married, back

when she was a friend. I never knew

her father. So why the struggle

to attend? To be politic, to feel less

awkward when we run into each other

at a meeting back in Boston? I suppose

that's enough motivation. Or,

maybe I simply relish

something new

for my repertoire of complaints.

A flat tire, broken axle—

a chance to show

how far I'll go to suffer.

### Meditation Waiting for the Orange Line

If I were a savant,

I could calculate the number

of lavender tiles that cover

the walls in this station.

I could detect the aria

in the brake squall

arriving from Forest Hills.

I would grasp the quantum dimensions

that transcend the urge to copulate,

and that lush-lipped girl's photograph

in the frame beyond the tracks

could never entice me

to purchase toothpaste

that can't possibly whiten

enamel this stained by coffee

and neglect. If I were a savant,

I could remain mute,

without consequence

or criticism: _He hardly ever_

_talks to anyone._ I might know

the mollusk phylum's almost infinite

array, from pre-history to present.

No one would know.

Gifted as a sideshow act

in an intellectual circus,

I could recite Sumerian limericks

and every move from the past

twenty years' chess championships.

If I were a savant, I'd tattoo syllables

down the backs of waterfalls

and watch them coalesce to sonnets,

in the mist and foam of pools

at the base of the cliffs

we're all tottering toward.

But I'm not a savant.

I'm an overwrought grunger

passing through mid-life

with a messenger's bag of images

muddled as crayon drawings.

I am St. Francis to mosquitos.

I guard a small vault

dubiously filled with trivia:

the two dozen counties in the states

of Vermont and New Hampshire,

the lyrics of most songs

Pearl Jam's recorded.

To be a savant might be

wondrous. To scan and recall

every word in the dictionary—

vocabulary unfettered by the urge

to reorder and coax meaning

to the surface. To the savant,

meaning kicks off its shoes

and finds a careworn bed in a room suffused

with incomprehensibility's pleasures . . .

the city's walls resting in the distance,

untroubled by a single ambition. If

I could join the savants' tribe,

would I? It's easy to proclaim one might

choose to undiscover the practical,

to let incandescence dissolve into dark's mystery.

Perhaps what's wanted is a variation

on Kurzweil's singularity: To integrate

intellect and insight with savant capacity

could be the next stop on evolution's tour.

Here's the Orange Line, at last . . .

screeching, rolling, rectangular

pumpkin, ready to ferry us

to Downtown Crossing.

If I were a savant, I might

not know to get on. I might stand

here all afternoon, like an arrow

without a bow. Harmless

potential. Traveler on an island

of flesh, unsure how to reach

any destination beyond

this maze of interior revelations.

If I were a savant, wouldn't I

be happy

just to be here?

### Blowing the Third Eye

A friend would never threaten to paddle

up the Amazon in a canoe commanded

by an American-turned-shaman. What

could be less American? Wait, did you say

hallucinogens are involved? And,

a vomit bucket? It sounds suspiciously like

the Age of Aquarius as reimagined by Dick Cheney.

Or, a variation on the sublimely surreal—like the time

Allen Ginsberg cleared an audience at an all-girl's school

in Kansas with a soliloquy on ass-fucking.

Language can only transcend so far. It takes

a good hit of ayahuasca to blow the lid

from the third eye, to melt the wall where

the snakes gyrate like electrified ribbons

through undetected dimensions. Split and

spill the terrors that hunger for one's life . . .

those vibratory hells that demand homage,

that refuse to cauterize lonely nights with vodka

bottles. When television nurses hunger

for amenable society, who could argue

that the ship has foundered on a shoal

of snapping serpents? In the jungle's night,

any shaman's a beacon. Even the Pentecostal pastor,

with all his uncaged tigers of damnation, might seem

a friend. Physical ruin feels right (or at least familiar).

Whatever potion one can find to swallow, to salvage

the pretension of a soul . . . that's medicine worth

a paddle up the Amazon, worth a wade in magical

self-delusion's improbable realms. Say hello

to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson . . .

they're the only angels

who might prove all that's unseen

transcends the drying skin

on this latticework that carries us

through these days.

### Under the Influence

The best days often include

a browse through a bookstore.

When my libido was more

vigorous, I liked to sneak a paperback

kama sutra to the automotive section.

I appreciate the symmetry now—

the proper calibration of carburetor

and clitoris both essential

to effective performance and power.

Though at the time, I imagined,

if caught, I could claim to have found

(quite unexpectedly) this sexual concordance

tucked between Edmunds Used Car Guide and

the Encyclopedia of Corvettes. These days,

I gravitate to the literary review section.

It's interesting to see poems written by people

I know—and there's always the potential to find

that gloriously intact shell, tumbling in the surf,

inhabited by some living thing wanting someone

to appreciate its nearly unrecognizable luster.

Tonight I sit beside a poster— _On Becoming_

an Alchemist: A Guide for the Modern Magician.

So much wisdom undiscovered, crusted and nestled

like jewels in the strata of bound pages. Though

we're such lazy miners, requiring Provigil's

stimulation and the simulated realities of television

to provoke the intellect. I might hurry back down

Newbury Street to catch Saturday Night Live.

What a metaphoric mash. This week's show's a repeat—

leftover, half-clever satire in three minute skits, wedged

between commercials. I've got a bed half-buried

in books and unread _New Yorker_ s. It makes

me apprehensive to sleep with so much knowledge

wanting to snuggle with my witless, empty notebook

of a mind. So, I'll probably doze on the couch

and wake to infomercials in the netherworld

that insomniacs are cursed to wander—

having dreamt a shaman with a blouse half-

unbuttoned, finding the windows

to my consciousness open—believing

it's Whitman's fingers brushing my hair,

trusting I've written this indisputably compelling

paean for an original century.

William Doreski

### Gathering Sea Lavender

Gathering sea lavender

in salt marshes south of Brunswick

we ease ourselves into contours

so gentle they don't show on maps.

Only the washboard effect

of successive waves of lavender

reveals a dainty presence.

Sea lavender sells for five

dollars a spray in Boston,

but we're harvesting just enough

to warm us one dreary winter,

a candelabra as nostalgic

as my mother's genealogy.

Last night when the wind banged the doors

in our rented cottage and the tide

swept our neighbor's dory from the beach,

we felt each other quicken in sleep

as we both dreamt of gathering

sea lavender in brilliant light.

I also dreamt, quite separately,

that a former lover came home

to sort through my possessions

and take away what pleased her,

especially sentimental

items like the shard of slate

from the Deerfield Massacre stone,

the purple ribbon from Robert

Lowell's grave, the small glass cat

that was my first gift from my wife.

No wonder when morning came

I proposed we scout the marshes

for sea lavender, despite the rain,

our bodies still uneasy

upon us, the briny damp

revealing as X-rays or radar,

the losses of our previous lives

reflected by the stony fog

and empowered by the radiance

ignited by our love of the sea.

### Hurricanes Named After Us

The season's first two hurricanes

have named themselves after us.

As they plow across the Atlantic

toward Florida, we drift over

books we've admired all our lives.

You're still retreating from Moscow

in the bosom of _War and Peace_

while I drift along the equator

in the doldrums of _Moby-Dick_.

Your storm will cross to the Gulf

before mine. Your violence spent

on the cringing Everglades, you'll ease

long before reaching Galveston,

while passing south of the Keys I'll trip

unimpeded down to Veracruz

and shatter on Mexico's highlands.

The summer heat drips from the trees

in long greasy strings of drool.

Your air-conditioned townhouse

insulates you from the silence

that centers in my tiny house

as though a giant foot has crushed

the finest of my earthly functions.

Soon the fall semester will fill

our datebooks. Scholarly poise

will sculpt you upright and prim,

but I'll slump like Igor to class

and growl and frighten young women

and make the stoned young fellows laugh.

Neither of us look like hurricanes,

but the government knows better,

and named its storms as precisely

as decorum allows. Enjoy

your book. Palm Beach and Miami

curse you, but don't worry. Soon enough

the sun will shine in your wake,

while safely offshore the hurricane

named for me will parallel you,

but diverging as subtly

as I do almost every day.

### Truro: the Bay Side

Watching blunt men surf-cast sand worms,

you want to learn to catch the groundfish

we sauté and eat with gusto.

But flounder, halibut, and cod

avoid shallow bays. Rockfish, croakers,

bluegills, shad, bluefish. If you hook

a big one—a forty-pound bluefish—

it could drag you into the water

where you'd squeal in Technicolor

until I dragged you out again.

These long July days seem delicate

and blue-white as Delft pottery.

The sky revolves on a pivot

about a hundred miles overhead.

The surf-casters mutter to themselves

but rarely speak to each other

and never to us or the other sun

people scattered on the seamless beach.

Maybe at dusk when fish are biting

I'll rent a casting rod and teach you

to fling bait far enough to tease

a cruising striper to strike. Maybe

you'll catch one. But then you'll cry

for the pain you've inflicted. You'll free

the creature back to its netherworld,

and for the next few hours regret

that you ever invaded its space.

### The Posthumous Look of a Diner

The posthumous look of a diner

on a hot Vermont afternoon

forces me to stop for lunch.

The parking lot saddens, one car

angled in the shade, the gravel

stippled and rutted and weedy

where a wooden picnic table

crumbles with decay. The metal

sheathing has dented. Concrete steps

trip me into gloom. The waitress

sags with adolescent splendor,

hunching to avert herself

from my potentially male gaze.

I order with downcast eyes

so she doesn't have to blush.

Three ceiling fans rotate slowly,

and an air conditioner rattles

in its window perch, a chilly sigh

exuding like the breath of a tomb.

The other customers, a couple

in their eighties, leave a tip

shining on the table and depart.

Stevie Wonder on the radio

sings something from the Seventies.

The waitress proffers coffee. I nod

as politely as I dare, vacant stools

rebuking me for being here,

booths haunted by food-smells

many years old. The ski crowd

will pack this place winter weekends,

but the summer glare exposes

the delicate grease-film embalming

the fixtures, the ground-in filth

of the tile floor dutifully mopped

every evening, and the fatal

heart attacks ghosting from a grill

tended with care by a cook so lean

the waitress, if she weren't so shy,

could strum his ribs like a harp.

### Milkweed Days

Across the Fremont land the wisps

of milkweed flutter like strands

of exploded cobweb. I palm

a half-pod and crumple it

to feel the papery compression,

then feed the fragments to the breeze.

When I was six I pestered

Joanne Szluc with sticky tangles

of milkweed filaments. Armed

with the milk squeezed from the leaves,

I pawed the mess into her hair.

The cottony fibers were white

as Grandma's earnest and faintly

senile gaze, so Joanne cried

that I'd made a hag of her.

We stared at each other a moment,

thrilled that she'd used the word "hag."

The tattered milkweed stalks relaxed

as we ran off laughing; then later,

to punish, she pushed me face-down

into garden mulch, and I let her.

Huso Liszt

Fresco, The Forlorn Virgin, Dirbi Monastery, Kareli, Georgia

The history of Georgia is that of repeated invasions from the south, up between the Black and Caspian Seas. Few peoples in the world have an ancestry more dominated by rape. Contemplate the Forlorn Virgin of Dirbi, and its corrosion by violence. Remember that the monastery was a nunnery. Don't forget that Stalin was born in Gori, just thirty miles away. The faux culture of a State based on the abstractions of Marxist ideology did not so much supplant a culture, as take root in a poverty of violence where the peaceful transmission of cultural wealth from family and society to child had been rendered impossible

–Keith Smith

i. Paleo-Violence in Plaster

We saw it first in Pernambuco

from the stoop of our rustic farmhouse

roofed with thigh-molded tiles.

Enormous toads emerge from the orchard

to the scent of orange blossoms, jasmine, chicken shit

as the sun pissed its blood and sank. A boy

appeared out of a darkening tunnel

up from the river through the trees.

He was the youngest son

of the caretakers we had unwittingly

dislodged by buying the farm the week

before from their landlord.

We were in danger, he said. You'll need a gun, he said,

and pointed to a cold flurry of bullet holes,

a heavy-flake snow perpetually falling

in the plaster around the windows.

We saw it again, and again, even next door

in the boarded-up house where Jose de Deu's

brother was murdered. We'd pried

the door open, and in barred shafts

of biblical light, a host of tree

frogs leached to the walls

and disappeared though the roof

as if they were the severed tongues

of the survivors

lunging for the cover of a time-

darkened mouth. And there in the plaster walls

fell the same heavy snow.

The silence that each violence had scarred

into the wills of the living there

was so palpable. This is poverty!

not an absence things,

but a drought,

a truth drought in floods of silence.

When the real drought came dust rose

like insurmountable drifts of snow.

ii. As She Was First Painted

Midway through her last eutherian trimester,

the flush of certainty drained from her faith.

No fire could unchill her from her doubt

which rose with every parent else against herself.

It had been at best an unamazing dream.

She could brave the market as well as anyone,

and once she'd passed a spot of bronze

to hear a teller weave the Greek and Roman stories,

and had shyly scoffed at all the shapes

the so-called gods would take

to relieve an earthly passion.

But now she came to question how trusting she,

and how unmiraculous he

had been—so unlike a raging swan, or shower

of golden light. To be sure, the angel

had been bright,

but only with an earthlike radiance,

as if the shadows in her room had all

conspired to be nowhere near his eyes and hands;

and she had seen a Roman's slave

with just as clean and shiny hair.

Worse, she had never once refused

to linger for the tales of shipwrecks

the soldiers like to tell, and their funny,

awkward rescues from despair;

and her people

had seen her talking to them there.

She had imagined her time laid up with the holy baggage

would be more graceful than this. She'd accepted

the vomiting; she hardly noticed

the bugs of lamb fat stuck to her chin

as she scraped the pot for more stew,

but even the colostrum that seeped through her

swollen nipples repulsed her now, and worse,

if the baby kicked at all, his kicks were as weak

as the spastic reflexes of any half-living thing.

iii. Dirbi Now

The snow, the snow, for eight

centuries, the snow,

by Monguls, Turks, Persians,

Khwarzem, Timur,

Dagestani, Turkestani,

Germans and Russians, over

and over, each war the same:

the men arrive, the women die,

or go.

Only the Dirbi Virgin remains

confined within the Dirbi walls,

a wedge of fresco

in deepening drifts of snow.

The flurries of spear, bullet, cannon

scars and holes

now render her forlornness

as beleaguerment by cold.

And the fossilizing swelling

above her lap, which once gave

hope to others in confinement,

conceals the reluctant slouch of

transformation, slouching

still, as with newer gods from

somewhere else, toward the same

old Bethlehem to be born.

### The Death of a Whale

it isn't the

harpoon kills

the whale, it's

the line

from which they can't

be rid.

their nostrils are a field

of nerves

vaginally sensitive

to feel the shed

of water, the snap

of air with every

rise, to time

each blow and breath

to fall between

caprices of

the breaking waves.

or do they begin their blow

underwater, and feel

its pressure at

the surface change?

whatever. in

their panic, and

in their pain,

and under the

inexplicable

horizontal

force of the ship,

there are breaths

they can't arrange.

### From Alaska: At a Conference on the Poetry of Place

On the closing of the last light bulb factory in the United States of A.

Let us have a conference and connect!

And admit to the robbery and murder our consumption funds.

If our tastes and dependencies here

arm tyrannies there

just as the love of pepper once

launched a quarter-million ships to slit

their way,

throat by throat, up the coasts of the orient,

what is the poetry of here, of place, and only here?

From my porch in rainforest, Alaska,

rainwater complicates over the clogged and rotted eave gutter

and pounds on the mossy concrete below.

There's a simple _pi pi pi pi_ of rainfall on the steps,

a bassline patters out on popcorn kelp in the tidal zone,

off salt-fluted hemlock leaning out to sea.

Only a mind could organize so much water,

and _dum dum titty dum_ , suddenly

it's Mozart. I'm in the 18th century.

And I'm drifting east, high over unnamed Deer Mountain, Blue Lake,

over the ridge to Harriet Hunt, unnamed Carroll Inlet,

Portage Cove, and the random fires of summer fishing camps,

Behm Canal, and the dark continent.

Lights cluster, mussel-like, to the shores

of the the black Atlantic: Boston, Philadelphia, New York.

The silence and utter darkness of ocean, then

the first lights of Europe,

scattered smoky fires of the agricultural poor,

now, Paris, Avignon, Vienna. From high windows

into the great parlors of the western world, we see Lords

in pink and robins-egg-blue powdered wigs

lean forward at the waist

before ladies gowned like giant jellyfish

and dance, gloriously lit

by oil extracted from harpooned,

drowned, and boiled humpbacked whales.

I look down at my clothes, my Patagonia fleece from Sri Lanka,

my Indonesian pants. Today, I ate

an orange from Chile, apples from New Zealand, Belgian cheese.

My American clam shovel leans against my wall.

Up and down Tongass Narrows, reflections

of crimelights, yellow incandescent windows of houses,

winks of video and tv

streak out through the rain and waver with the water.

It's the eyes of tired Chinese parents drowning in the sea.

Pieter Breughel the Elder's The Parable of the Blind

Listen! The blind are leading the blind.

Hear the wary linkage of six men, their breath

and fearful muttering, how their syllables

shorten and tonally ascend

with each stumble and jolt. Hear how their tentative

shuffle hisses music contrapuntal to the toads

that screech to populate the village ditch

where sewage makes wet kissing sounds

against the rustling reeds.

Their staves click between pebbles and grass

like thumbnails picking dirty teeth.

Their alms bowls jangle and thock against

their beaded rosaries and belts.

But where are those capricious landmarks

of the human voice, of the villagers who see? Somewhere,

a woman shouts insults into

the vast cavern of her drunk son's ear. There must

be birds, too, twittering indifferently, high in the trees.

Now hear the slip of gravel, the grunt, and then,

the prodigious splash.

Now, hear the things you wouldn't have heard:

The scrape of broomstraw as monks in the steepled church

sweep pheasant bones from between the pews,

and angels repeating whispers, mouth to ear,

over the great arc of paradise, to laugh

at each new garbled truth

emerging on the other side.

Hear aldermen belching, softly, ale gas,

counting money in their troubled sleep.

Be, for a moment, blind.

You lead. A hand rides your shoulder;

its grip tightens and slackens

as you pitch over ground swells. Leaning

forward, you choose your way carefully, always

balancing against stumbling over roots and divots,

your hand on guard for low-hanging branches.

Suddenly, you feel the first horror of air where ground

should be, and twisting your body mid-step,

as if you might scramble back across the trespassed air,

you fall backward into the water.

This is the parable of the blind:

No precipice exists from which men can fall forever,

except within the human heart, where fear dissolves

the underpinning earth. What would it take,

in darkness and in panic, to shout out to the others

as you fall, "Stop! Fall back. The ditch is here. Hold still!"

It's too late. The men tumble

cursing & thrashing on top of you. But let's say you, unlike

your fellows, don't keep falling after landing

in the ditch, but find your feet, the bottom, the surface

of the water, air. Can you now shout, "Fools!

Stand up! The ditch is only three feet deep! Stand up!"

Or do you stand up, wipe your mouth, and wade away,

and leave the rest to drown?

Clifford Hill

### How natural you are

why are you wearing

that tangle of honeysuckle

around your neck

that torn blouse

of rose bush thorns

tight across your breasts

that brittle skirt

of oak bark breaking

against your thighs

everyone already knows

how natural you are

from the way you move

with baby sparrows

nesting in your hair

### Ice storm in Boston Public Gardens

Trees have turned metal

Emblems

Of my own limbs

Bearing a weight

Of old love

Now wood and ice

Still there's promise

Of spring thaw

Bark cracks

Crystal breaks

A sudden laugh

Through leaf

Branch trunk

The whole root of you

### Domestic resolutions

It's Saturday in the new year: I rise

at eight in domestic air to spread

lemon curd on toast and brew mint

tea in a clay pot; I carry a chaste tray

to the late bed you occupy in our

new resolve, egg and butter

beneath your creamy underwear

I'll wash at nine. All week long

my list of resolutions grew: musk oil

for a man's rub of leather in a woman's

boots and beeswax for shine of oak

in your secret room: rise, old friend,

dance the winter sun: with a broom

of love I'll sweep our closet clean.

### Jasmine branch

the gold lights of Manhattan rise

and soon the jasmine branch plunges

once again in the childhood well

we crawled into for just five dollars

on a dare and there first smelled

the senseless odor of death now

hushed and violent upon this city's

summer air to every overgrown child

migrated here from provincial town

in doomed hope that memory's

quick shame and long haunt will dim

these thousand lights still shining

on that jasmine branch I break again

and thrust into your drowning hand

### Tangerine peels

two women and a man

sit in winter light

eating chocolate and tangerines

from a crystal bowl

mint tea steams the turquoise pot

a green canary sings Mozart

among dying hibiscus

the man hears familiar talk

of transsexual politics

does gender hold the heart

at bay in heterosexual love

when bodies are the same

which can dominate the other

is coupling war or just a game

and if a game whose metaphors

furnish the players' rules

how do they know to play

a game whose rules get written

even during the act of play

not sure what to say

or which to love

the man stands up

to clear the plates away

the woman in white

has eaten all her peels

only the chocolate's

silver wrappings remain

on a single green leaf

the woman in black

has torn her peels

into tiny bits and stacked

them in three heaps

upon three green leaves

the man stacks three plates

in the turquoise sink

he wonders how

each woman's hunger

can include a man

he chews a shred of bitter

peel to find the answer

pappa pappa pappageni

the canary's song is clear

above the women's laughter

tart tangerine in a wounded ear

R. G. Evans

### Dungeoness

The worst part about being the guy in the cartoon

hanging shackled to a dungeon wall is the mirror.

It wasn't always here, like back when I was young

and sure of rescue, hurling curses at my jailers

wherever, whoever they were. I was vain enough then

I'd probably stare for hours, mugging at my reflection,

sucking in my gut. But no. They slipped it in

one night last year as I hung sleeping. When I awoke,

both I and the haggard old man across from me

screamed ourselves hoarse. Or is it as I hanged sleeping?

If I could shrug, he'd shrug too. Xylophone-ribbed.

Hair and beard an inseparable, lice-ridden thicket.

I know it's just a mirror, but I also know he watches me

as I sleep, or pretend to sleep, dreaming that instead

of being stretched by time here in this god-lost dungeon,

I'm somewhere in the Caribbean or South Pacific maybe,

just me and a lone palm tree, no one who looks like me.

No one at all. One day if I'm lucky a bottle washes up,

a little rolled note inside that says only, "Look."

And when I do, he's there in the glass surface of the bottle,

hollow-eyed and screaming at me loud enough to wake me

but not to rouse my jailers. They wouldn't come

if he screamed all night, the way he's planning to.

### Something about a Suicide

Something about a suicide makes us

tread more lightly as if the ground

once trod by the voluntary dead

grew spongy and unwell, as if to move

might send distress signals like a fly

in a web to whatever hungry mouth

might be waiting to eat us.

We make a thousand secret shrines

we think no one can see, but pass another faithful

on the street and you know. The bowed head.

Eyes looking straight at someone no longer here.

Every one a reliquary, bearing pieces

of the one true do-it-yourself cross,

ready to nurse doubt into belief and beyond.

### The Edge

Go to the edge. We have always gone to the edge,

to the place where the land becomes the sea,

where with one more step we become something less

solid, less substantial as well. This is why we can't stay,

why the edge compels us to take a bit of it away.

A handful of scallop shells. A bit of sea glass

bluer than our memory of the sea itself. Perhaps

one larger shell, one with an obstruction

that looks like a concrete seal, no way to hold it

to the ear and have the imagined sea remind us

of the edge. Take it away. Take it into your home.

Forget it for a day or two. You will find it or

it will find you, the way the wrong breeze

from the salt marsh finds you: by the nose.

You will find that the obstruction was a living foot

that dragged its spined and sacred safety

out of the closet and onto the bathroom floor

to its final rest on the rough, sea-less tile.

The edge never comes to us, and this is why.

We know no better than to think we have control,

that the edge will bow to us. Go to the edge

with your shell-shaped ear. A sound like the sea

will be waiting.

### The Magi

The alpaca seemed resigned to the vultures

that ringed it where it lay in the mud.

The black-headed birds stood sentinel,

not moving a feather, just watching

as the alpaca's chest rose and fell

and rose and fell again, rapid, shallow breaths.

The vultures waited. A soaking rain

had fallen for hours, only stopping

when the birds arrived. The alpaca lay

sunken so far in the black and deepening slop,

the stillborn cria beneath her breast

all but concealed, only a pair of legs

motionless in the mud. The mother panted

and tried to lick her child's wool clean.

The cria disappeared into the muck

under its mother's weight. The vultures

stood in a ring, watching, waiting.

The low skies promised rain.

### The Maximist

When he thought he loved the human race

he wrote novels, brick-sized monuments to lives

in chaos, filling the holes in those lives

with every word he could. Then he fell in love

with days that certain people lived

and wrote short stories, road maps to guide them

through the intricacies of 24 hours in a life that

as a whole he could never love. Then he became a lover

of organs: heart, brain, liver, the generous lock and key

of penis and vagina. At last he was a poet,

scribbling 15 minute odes to love and loss,

drunks and other philosophers, and he would

stand up at a microphone and read them,

like a man fellating himself in public.

But now he is a hermit, more wisdom than love in his life.

He writes maxims in the sand, and when the tide comes in,

in the water. The wise man knows,

but tries to love nonetheless. A single fist

contains more truth than all the libraries in the land.

This is the sand. That is the sea.

Try to tell the difference to a word.

David Kann

### Dead Reckoning

For Beth Buxton

Well, you died by inches

fighting the filthy crab,

surgeons carving important pieces

from you,

always one step behind.

Tell me:

when you lay

together with your lover,

though your desire had become

no more than an echo,

and when you let him

uncover you

and reveal the gnarled landscape

your body had become,

did you turn your head away

in the slant lamp-shadows,

like a child believing

not to see him meant

you were free

of his gaze

while he read

the chart of scars,

some red and purple and new,

some tallow-yellow and settled-in—

that odyssey of agony—

could he squint through the map

and regain the territory,

and navigating by dead reckoning,

did he lay his cheek by your tender navel

and breathe you in,

honey-sweet as an infant?

### Bolus of Flame in the Sistine Chapel

The moment after Michelangelo

finished

the Sistine ceiling,

he cleaned his brushes,

snuffed

his lanterns, turned and walked away

for wine and a lover, needful,

stunned

by completion's void,

leaving the room, leaving God

swaddled

in a cloak red as sunrise,

by pink, cloud-rounded cherubim

lifted,

with his finger almost touching Adam's.

In the reeking dark,

filled

with snuffed candle-smoke and drying plaster's smell,

life's bright unruly spark

leaped

from God's finger to Adam's,

and like sunstruck oil

flowed

and filled his palm, while God

rose into the night and

faded

indifferent, leaving

His orphan reclining on bare rock. Adam

raised

his burning hand to his mouth,

swallowed the bolus of flame, then

stood,

staggering under the weight of conscious flesh,

found his fiery tongue and

spoke

himself and all his get into time.

### Report from Planet Senex

Whoever is afraid of death will carry it on his shoulders.

—Lorca

Oh, but this is a hard land

to love.

Grey hills slump

and thick rivers

sprawl in deltas

splayed like dead hands.

Tan sand's strewn

with flakes of flint and chert.

No steel to strike.

No kindling.

Nothing to slice

but brown lichen,

rags of dead flesh

on empty skulls.

The shambling wind skins

dust from the ground.

Sunrise is a gray smear,

and sunset stains

the sky with spilled ink.

All night

in the dark

sick fish wail

from a stagnant lake,

tearing the clouds.

In the black gashes

a few stars dim,

their voices growing red,

like opals sinking

in thick oil.

### Pieta in Red

I found a liquidambar tree,

blazestruck with autumn and sunset.

Among its five-point leaves,

a red-tail hawk

pinned a sprawled dove

to a branch.

She dipped her sickle beak

to shredded pink meat.

The naked dove didn't move,

complicit in the slow

tearing toward its heart.

In the windless evening

the red light died

in night's slow slide

up the flaming tree.

When the Red-Tail gutted me

with her eye.

I filled

with the icy consent

of lichen, mushroom and frost.

Then she closed

her switchblade talons

and rose above

the leaves

with the lolling dove.

Ricky Ray

### Death, a Wife, and a Life of Broken Rules

I

Is it because

I'm tired tonight

that I don't want

to think of death,

my lifelong confidante,

the ear in me

that has no flesh,

that never had a drop of blood

to spill

between some crack in the desert—

the ear that,

as far as the eye can tell,

is not here

but is nonetheless wholly listening?

II

Whatever the reason,

I must decline.

No, my friend, I do not want

a glass of wine with you,

a tray of cheeses

and fine cuts of meat;

I do not want to shove you in my mouth

and savor your descent into my bowels.

III

I want the simplicity of water

tinged with the minerals

of my hometown,

the familiar blend of sulfur,

iron and arsenic that makes

hotel water taste wrong.

IV

I want a joke

and the knowing laughter

that swells in wit

born of sorrow,

sorrow that bites

and leaves a mark

that mars

every flawless mirror.

V

I want a broken back that has just experienced

an uncommon day of relief,

a spine stretching toward the heavens

that doesn't recoil in pain.

VI

I want to know why the pigment in that painting

made me feel the way I do. I want to live

another night in the company of my wife's skin.

I want the moment when her shades of cream

conspired to teach me what I could never

have taught myself about the complexities of snow.

VII

I close my eyes

and I am there;

she is next to me

and we are happy;

the future

is a condition

apart from

our time together.

VIII

They tell me I am foolish to dwell,

that there is no life in death

and no bringing back what's gone.

But I tell you

they don't know everything

and life is a breaker of rules.

IX

And what my heart does with me

when I turn myself over to its aims

makes me a firm believer

that love can do anything it wants.

X

When I want to be with her,

all I have to do

is sit like this

and close my eyes.

Then it's easy,

it's like

I've awoken in the night

and all I have to do is

peel back the covers

and feel my way

to her

through the dark.

### The Music of As Is

Dearheart: forgive the extreme tardiness of my reply—

I meant to reply much sooner, but, alas, intentions

are weaklings who hardly ever muscle their being

into keeping its appointments. Interesting, the notion

that we're nearly always late to or altogether missing

the meetings set up for us by our desires,

and thereby run around on the stringy detritus

of our potential. Why stringy? I don't know,

but when I think out the field and walk through its grass,

I envision the shed potential not as flakes of skin

drifting down, but as strung out guts falling in ropes,

though without the gore or macabre mess—no,

these are the guts of something finer within us,

some heavenly-feathered cross-fiber, some

suddening strings of energy that break into music.

When I lie down in that field and feel the wind

make followers of my hairs, I envision us running

over these barely perceptible snakings of failure—visible,

like much of beauty, only if we actively look for them—

and think yes, there's music in the air, so much music

that the strings beneath us and the strings of us

combine and conduct for the ear that cocks

with ache to hear it, and that's the music I want:

the music of the way things go, not the way things

could go, if. Oh, I meant to write you a letter dearheart,

but I guess this is as it should be—I was never much

of a correspondent. Still, imagine the possibilities

of all that music, waiting like starlight to be

plucked, threaded through the ears and taken down.

### The Blooming Noses

Flowers, these people are flowers who can brace the wind of a winter's day, but not the wind of a bullet. Most aim is bad despite the years of training and most rubber bullets will miss, but the few that don't will scatter the majority into hiding, the rebels into hills, while dissidents shiver in abandoned buildings, heating beans over small blue flames. Some of the shooters will want to change sides, but will be bound to ignore their consciences and abide by the pullers of strings. Strings of the purse, not strings of the heart. Strings that say plant the drugs in the pocket and watch the felony grow. Mace the face and watch the dissent shrivel into tears. Rough up for good measure, but not in front of the camera, and not the pretty female face or the old face or the rest of the faces where it's blatantly visible. A kidney shot for the mouthy ones and a stomach jab to widen the eyes of the poorly dressed and highly educated. Raid the encampment in the middle of the night and make a racket that would make your scalp seeking ancestors proud. Burn the library and break the cookware. Accost the medics, dump their stores into the sewers. Herd them all like sleepy cattle. Hint at slaughter. Make them feel that their life is in danger and tell them that you're doing it for their own good. Their hygiene has been declared a public hazard and their health is in jeopardy in more ways than one. This is the land of baby powder, not the land of shit and mud. This is the land of tightly controlled chemical stimulation and the doctors are standing by to diagnose your condition. The pharmacists are standing by to fill your orders. It's time to put away the signs and pick up your belongings and head up the mountain of debt. It's time to think of your children in the present and forget about a nebulous future. It's time to face the facts of your position and make your journey along the predefined routes. And if you insist on questioning rules, if you insist on picking at scabs, then it will be time to call in the hounds, and there is nowhere left on earth that escapes our gaze for long. If we have to hunt you down, we will, and then it will be time to teach you a lesson. Then it will be time to taste the blood of a traitor. Then it will be time for locked doors, brutal beatings, and the torturous hands of power. Then it will be time to wake up day after day and smell the bloody, blooming noses. And then, then it will be time to listen to the blood in our bodies, the blood down our faces, the blood on our hands, and feel our hearts pump with the truth of what the blood tells us to do.

### The Last Good Thing We Do

for Amy King

Turning my day inside out, all I hear is the pounding

that woke me up late last night, or early this morning,

the sound of a hammer to a piece of wood

that makes no sense in a February land of concrete.

The garbage truck it wasn't, that nightly nuisance

hauling away the bottles of drunks

and the excesses of a culture that prides itself

on purchasing power. If a thing breaks, it hardly matters,

there's ten million others like it—one of a kind

is a thing of the past and the show will go on without you.

Disbelief is understandable, and also not worth the debate.

Have a look. There's a line of stars extending out the door,

around the corner and over into undetectable galaxies.

A fiery mixture of redheads and gas giants and blond

ice planets coldhearted down to their greasy, mean-spirited,

middle-aged defiance. Maybe some comet of realization

will undo the habits that harm them, but the chances are

so not good it makes the lottery look like a shoo-in.

We should get together and hash it out, spec a plan

to make amends and stop ignoring wounds,

but who would take such a theory seriously?

When has anyone ever wanted to get together

over a glass of water? We could give it a try

but I bet three flies and a lesson in gardening

one of us would signal the waiter and place the order

to wine it down. And that would be the end of that.

How easy it is to bring hands to the table

in contemplation of work, interlace fingers like the fates

of neighbors and throw them up in helplessness,

or hopelessness, or a botchy, beleaguered despair.

Because nothing can be done. Because no one in this

field of compassion is in a position to do anything about it.

Because it's out of our hands and we haven't the calluses

in our nature to grab ahold of the ropes and tug.

The subject is the earth and Atlas has an achy shoulder.

And yet mothers who have no kids are this very minute

teaching rooms of them how to behave. Prophets in

hand-me-downs with newsprint pamphlets are knocking

on doors trying to save as many souls as they can.

Businessmen are buying young men farms to work

and aging bikers are salvaging soup from vegetables

sent toward the compost heap—to feed the foodless,

to serve their country, to show a man that someone, somewhere

cares whether or not you starve. There's enough good will

in every small town to make even the blond bitch weep.

And there's enough carelessness in every indifferent heart

to lead us explosives-first into a species-leveling bloodstorm.

And sadly, sadly, sadly, that may be the last good thing we do.

### Discomfort and Its Undoing

Discomfort, mere ( _ha, mere_ ) discomfort, never mind pain, discomfort alone will make of us irritable idiots, men and women who take the easy road, the wrong road, the road that leads to trouble. And we will curse the road for being the way it is, and our feet for having trodden it in such sad, disintegrating shoes.

And when we get to the end of that road, or a stopping place of realization, we will know it was the wrong way, and everything will be met with disgust, revulsion, the inclination to swallow all beauty and spew. The dissatisfaction of living will make our tongues unable to stand the taste of our own mouths. We will spit in the dust and get the spit on ourselves and glare at the sun as though it were the bright idea behind all of this.

Unless. Unless something gets in the way of our anger. Some messenger who intersects us—a tangerine for instance, just a tad overripe, forgotten at the bottom of the bag, might be the hook which untangles everything that went wrong. Then, as though peeling back a rind, the mind will section-by-section come clear. The senses will conduct the weather's music, and to their liking, even if the clouds hang heavy and low.

A foul wind might dog us, might drive us ever more contracted into ourselves, but we won't wish it ill. We'll lick our lips and lower our heads, listen to its whistle and commit it to memory, remember our summer together and say thanks, I know the going is rough, but you breathe for something too, I'm happy to share the road and I have a feeling we'll get there in the end.

Tori Jane Quante

### Watson and Crick with Double Helix

I'm behind the lens.

Crick says _Should we pose?_

He mocks professors with a smug grin and pointer,

while Watson plays student,

mouth agape with trepid ignorance.

They are school children on picture day;

Shirts tucked in like

mother told them to,

electric balding heads of hair,

neckties pulled a little too tight.

In their bodies, DNA is unzipping

and gathering up its other halves.

Somewhere along the twisted necklace

of their genes is that "pearl" of a paper,

the one that simply held a mirror up

and pointed it inward.

Their faces are beginning to break

into laughter right as I snap the shutter.

Oh, to be so young

and so sure you've changed the world.

To be dead right.

### Creatio ex Materia

It's not the kind of thing you can accept outright,

genesis, happening in your trashcan.

I imagine it started at the beginning.

Darkness over the stagnant water, the trash can sludge:

banana peels and coffee grounds, used tampons

and the cat's feces, liquefying together

in the neglected outdoor can until something

started growing. Something new.

Phospholipid bilayers forming at an alarming rate,

the advent of spines and skins, all happening

unnoticed, as things often are,

over the course of a week.

So when that woman, that rank smelling creature

emerged from her womb of garbage,

innocent of all but warm, putrid smells,

her thick mat of hair growing woven like a tapestry,

hips slender as a child's, body tarnished and hard

like a once golden Greek daughter of Chaos' own

how could I feel anything but awe,

even as she munched on a half eaten banana?

No, this was no daughter of a god.

She was mine. This creature—

she is what we breed when no one is watching.

I know now, that

out there, in oceanic miles

of garbage, landfills overflowing

with an abundance of new life,

a nation is rising up, born of our neglect.

The eternal matter is this moment,

giving way. _Creatio ex purgamentum_ ,

the gods whisper in their sleep.

We have left nothing else.

### World Leaders at the Premiere

The evening has just begun. See how those

monumental men, pillars of the Earth, stroll by?

Here's Vladimir, a vision in undulant gold,

the skirt of his dress a caress,

and fox fur scarves, no one has told him they're out of fashion.

Who cares? We love you Vladimir.

Notice, even the Dalai Lama has come off his mountain.

He's chatting with Pope Benedict, takes his hand in both his own and shakes

the fragile man vigorously by the arm, disrupting his pointy hat.

And everyone's darling Barack is wearing a slick little number

in simple shimmering black, curved

to the contours of his graceful neck and back.

King Abdullah stops for an interview.

_Tonight_ he says (he's wearing Valentino, the fall line)

Tonight we celebrate. And maybe, we bury the hatchet for good.

Because, of course, who in his right mind

wields a hatchet in Valentino?

They gather in the theater now,

file into neat lines of red velvet seats,

and jostle for armrests, suck in as others squeeze by.

Light flickers against their painted faces,

catches the gleam of their nails and jewels.

### Elijah

In the video he's running. He stumbles in sand,

barrel rolls back onto his feet and keeps running

and looking back and running until

he stops, his eyes and

his whole body searching the air.

For what? What ladder rolled out from the sky

is going to spirit him away from here?—

The wide Arizona desert. The car spinning its wheels in sand.

The police sirens drawing in close, closer.

Then he turns his back on the camera,

the one he must know is watching from a helicopter above.

I also want to turn away,

but I don't. I inhale and keep one breath.

I hold perfectly still.

Seconds later, he's put a bullet in his brain, and he's still standing,

a broomstick on the palm of the earth.

I start to think he'll stay there and wait for that ladder after all,

or for the sky to swallow him.

### Drinking Wine with your Neighbors

It is Sunday, after church.

A mammoth of a woman totters past me wearing

the most imposing yellow mu-mu I have ever seen.

She is a sun, a goddess among us.

I sit here

redefining my concept of beauty

to include this woman, her massive presence,

inelegance, my _god_ , how my eye is drawn

helplessly inward and upward

to the edges of vision and reason.

And suddenly I think of heat collapsing

into fall, muscadines fermenting on the vine

even before they are pressed into wine. How

can I think for even a moment that these things,

sun and grapes, streets and

this temporary home, are not the embodiment

of blessing?—

A sun, a goddess,

Reaching upward and outward—

_It is well, it is well, with my soul_.

G. L. Morrison

### Icarus' Father

Daedalus never understood the danger of joy.

He was imprisoned for this misunderstanding,

for making a device for the Queen's pleasure

when the King had ceased to please her.

The architects of pleasure are wingless

and short-sighted. The waxy geometry

of flight does not account for the angle

of wind against the skin or the sum

of sunlight. Logarithms of desire,

the delirious arithmetics of living,

dividing the sky between the sun

which will devour all our days

and the cold, blue sea. We fly akimbo

skimming the irreconcilable balance,

neither bird or fish enough to navigate

those distances. When I fall (and I will

fall) I know my father will fly on

without me. There are more sons

to be fathered on an unarrived shore.

Tomorrow is a margin in a ledger.

### Baba Yaga

three times this house turned its back

to the sea and its door toward me

what choice did I have but enter

the hunger outburned any hope or risk

outweighed the distance

I came to know as regret

what choice did I have but lay

my chin on the shelf beside yours

filling the room with our far-flung bodies

stretched as deliberate as sleep

my memory of our arms and legs open

fills the house—your head in the kitchen ,

hands flung into closets, one foot in the garage,

the heel of the other furrowing the yard

these rooms could not contain what we filled it with

and seemed to grow smaller around us

my house is still filled with the sounds of our sleeping

this was Baba Yaga's dream: that I was a hunger

you could never satisfy and not the woman

who followed the top she sent spinning

into forests, toward other houses

the truth is you were that hunger I fed myself to

until not even bones remained

and so had nothing left of myself for you

### Relentless Blue

I look for you in this poem with both hands

every word like the fingers of a blind sculptor

searching for your familiar face in the sightless clay.

If I were a painter, what I want to say

to you would be a shade of blue that couldn't be bought

only blended by loving curiosity and relentless patience

blue as sun rising on the ocean after a storm

blue as dawn, obsidian about to shatter

in a wet cacophony of color. Azure

love. Sapphire uncertainty.

Hungers marbled turquoise and lapis lazuli.

If I were a sailor, this poem would be

a hundred days at sea.

Lips cracked with salt and silence.

Above me—in the wet, endless sky—clouds row by

with a cargohold of storms and birds for barnacles.

Gulls shriek like lonely women.

Every star is an omen, I navigate by touch.

Below me—in the wet, endless sea—is everything

I dare imagine, everything that will ever

and will never be: wide and spiny as puffer fish

infinitely blue and filled with stones, fish, and sunken

treasure; the skeletons of clouds, birds, and stars;

sharks, mermaids, and the myriad of scuttling mysteries.

This poem is adrift in tomorrow's current

somewhere off the coast of yesterday.

Your hand on this page is bone china,

the pottery buried with Pharoahs, Klimt's

yellow kiss, swollen mouthed as O'Keefe flowers.

Your hand on this page is the woman who waits

in a cottage overlooking the sea

where every hundred-day journey hopes to end.

Joe Freeman

### In a Wood

The onset of winter and

All around me the furtive

Stacking of woodpiles as the

First snow gathers itself

Behind cloud banks in the west.

A poor squirrel am I that

Neither scurries nor hoards,

Ear cocked to a restless heart song

While winter entraps me unawares.

### Leaving the Oasis

Desert's edge, and I balk at

The hissing of shifting granules:

Whispers of desolate miles

And parched-throated doom.

Decision made, it is too late

To wonder if my dromedary

Skills have survived at all intact

Their long sojourn in the shade,

Or if I face mirage, delirium

And the heart's desiccation

Amidst the migrating dunes.

### David Butler

What made us dream that he could comb gray hair?

—W. B. Yeats, "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"

We were the first of six,

Sequentially paired, two to a room.

In even-numbered destiny

We lived in forced proximity

Some twenty-odd years—longer

Than you lived with anyone,

It seems worth noting now,

Now that you are gone,

Beyond reach of all but memory.

Odd how word of an early death

Gets out, finding old companions

Or lovers long out of touch—

As if, out of nowhere, they'd

Felt a cold wind blow and looked

To find its source, turning up,

Against the chill, the collar of memory

From a shared youth, a once-long-ago

When all things seemed possible.

Their tributes call to mind the promise

Of your early days; the golden circles

In which you traveled, in a time out of time,

Beyond recapture. I grant now what

I begrudged you then: you were the

Best of us, gifted of mind and body,

The center of every company, destined,

It seemed, for great things or, failing there,

At least happiness—at least that.

All of us deceived, looking back, perhaps

You most of all. Some missing gene,

Some somnolent flaw, lay in silent wait for you.

It stole upon you slowly, unrecognized,

Disguised as the excess of youth, a canker

Of burgeoning power, unbeknownst, that

Hollowed you out from within. Unmatched

With any heart true enough to anchor you,

Or call you back, you foundered—

more vulnerable than ever we dreamed.

Growing up in the long shadow

Your talents cast, I burrowed deep,

"An inner émigre," like Heaney's wood-kerne,

"Taking protective colouring

From bole and bark, feeling

Every wind that blows," husbanding

The sources of my slow-building strength:

The un-David, the blocking back,

The-one-that-could-be-relied-upon.

Lower profiled but better moored,

I became, for as long as memory serves,

In all that mattered (save strict chronology),

The eldest; strapping on the first

Of the many obligations you shed,

One by one, year by year, until,

At the end, your passing was strangely

Without context or consequence,

Barely a ripple in our daily lives.

Our shadow brother, long since

More wraith than real, you slipped

Away one night as if determined

To spare us any further trouble

Or drawn-out goodbyes; no fuss

Or bother that would be unbefitting

A life so empty and bereft of purpose

As yours had become (thus holding onto

A sort of pride, a kind of dignity).

Would that you could have spared me,

As I'm sure you would have wanted to,

My leaning over the lip of Adams Falls,

Shaking your ashes into the thin stream

That dribbled to the shallow pool below;

So weak a flow that it could barely

Carry you: your remains a gray sludge

I had to shove over the ledge

With my fingers, ingloriously apt.

Even so, one good rain will

Wash you down Linn Run into

A soil that knows much of rebirth

And renewal. If Ree was right

And we all come back again,

Know that I wish for you smoother

Sailing next time through; fewer gifts,

If need be, but more staying power,

And the same gentle, generous heart.

Farewell, my brother.

### Legacies

A contentious day at preschool.

"She has a stubborn streak," I offer.

"Not from you!" their smiles opine,

And I smile back, as if to concur.

What can they, who see me

Only in corpulent middle age,

Benign and becalmed,

Know of the fire that once

Burned blue from within

In a youth inseparable from

My thought, quoting Yeats,

Because I'll have no other?

And how often you were singed

By that unforgiving flame,

Flaring like a solar storm

Each time you fell short,

Or stumbled, along

The twisted, stony path

That led us both away

From that single, calamitous, event.

### Sojourners

What if between this life and the next

A soul, if only for a moment, knows

Where it's been, and where it's headed:

A blinding instant of self-awareness,

A glimpse of The Big Picture it spends

The next life trying to recall, a fading

Imprint on the closed eyelid of a soul

Plunged back, ready or not, into the trial

by existence?

What does it feel in that moment,

That grace of respite, catching its

Breath before heading back down?

Relief, to know there's meaning to it all?

Reluctance, to be stretched on the rack

once more?

Or, most likely of all, longing,

Unreconciled and inconsolable,

For the life left behind. The hands

Now forever unclaspable, a parent's

Or a child's; memories of a lover's

Touch, warm breath, whispered

Promises, circling then disappearing

Down the drain of eternity. Recollection

Stripped, identity shed and reentry

Accomplished, naked and soiled, again.

George Longenecker

### Bear Lake

Just three lights shine on the opposite shore.

At ten the waxing moon is only a dim sliver,

the sky still too bright for me to see stars.

White pelicans fly low over the water,

their wings beating slowly, so close

I can hear feathers against air.

The stars brighten and the pelicans

are still flying as I fall asleep.

When I awaken after midnight

the Milky Way lights the sky to the horizon,

from Idaho south to the dry Utah hills.

A plane blinks red and a single

satellite moves east to west.

All the rest is stars.

I lie on the desert shore

watching stars who shone

billions of years ago.

Eons from now somebody

may be watching our star.

By then we'll probably be gone;

maybe we'll have blown ourselves away.

It's hardly important to the Milky Way

whether one star shines—

but perhaps it matters

that twilight comes already at four

that across the lake a porch light comes on

that already the Milky Way is floating into dawn

that already one white pelican flies low over Bear Lake

perhaps it matters—

all the rest is stars.

### Samarra

A boy looks up at the gold-domed

mosque in Samarra as he does each morning—

it's stood a thousand years, it's reflected

the sun at dawn and dusk, it's echoed

thousands of morning prayers. He falls

backward in the explosion, his head crushed

beneath a fragment of ancient mortar and gold.

Bricks scream through the air and obliterate

prayers. The blast shakes minarets

which sway and crack in the explosion.

One of his eyes looks left to the Euphrates,

the other to the Tigris, but he doesn't see

gold leaf that rains down and shimmers in the sun,

doesn't see dust that rises where the golden dome

had been. Blood trickles from his mouth;

who knows to which river it will flow.

I saw it in the news the next day—

but probably it's already

been forgotten in the long history

of Babylon and America,

another small war,

not news anymore.

There's prayer as sirens wail:

Return your artillery and blood

from the Tigris and the Euphrates,

reverse the explosions,

turn back the sunrise.

Return the child's sight

so he may watch the golden dome of Samarra

come gleaming back in the morning sun.

### Completely Full

As we board, the flight attendant announces

that our plane is _completely full._ I want to ask

how it can be more than full, for isn't full by

nature complete? We leave Florida completely

full, next to me a mother and her young son.

Two hours later I'm jolted from my nap. The plane

bucks with turbulence, bounces, then brakes hard

as we land on the icy Newark runway. The whole

time the mother holds her son's hand and leans

close against him. He says only _it's okay Mom._

It is this then, the taking of a child's hand

that is more than full, more than complete.

He puts his other hand on hers.

We have landed and the plane taxis to the gate.

### Salt and Sorrow

A kitchen in a residence in Aleppo, Syria damaged Sunday in fighting.

—Narciso Contresas photo, The New York Times

Walls are blackened, there's a refrigerator

with rust at its bottom, stickers of yellow

butterflies and blackbirds on its door.

A dish towel hangs on the door handle

and atop sits a vase of purple paper flowers,

On shelves jars of spices still stand upright.

We can't see what's upright in the rest

of the home, if its power is on,

or if walls and windows are intact.

Charred ceiling plaster covers the floor,

no mortar shells or shrapnel though;

a jar of beans lies unbroken and a tiny drawer—

maybe for salt, we don't know, but nobody

can live without salt or sorrow,

no matter where. On a lower shelf rest

three small pairs of sneakers—

we can't see the children,

their parents or the photographer,

they must all be somewhere.

Outside—but outside is not in the picture—

we can't hear if there are explosions and artillery fire.

On the wall hang pans, a strainer and measuring spoons.

Why do some things fall and not others?

All the utensils are blackened,

but we can't tell whether from cooking

or just war. In a dish drainer cups dry;

they'll need to be washed again

if the family returns—

if they live—their blackened

kitchen sent naked around the world.

### Squeaky Fromme Remembers

I'm one of only a few women

who ever fucked Charlie Manson

I'm one of only two women

who tried to kill a president

I wore a red dress

the day I almost shot Ford

(I wish I'd shattered his head)

I loved the world's most famous killer—

(I wish I'd been the one to stab Sharon Tate)

plunging deeper and deeper

deeper and deeper—oh Charlie

stab me like you did then—

I had him more

than Patricia or any of _The Family_

the year of my trial

I got more mail than Charlie

I was the only woman

ever to escape from Alderson

(but they caught me)

I'm free now

(parole sucks and I miss the food)

my photo's in the Ford Presidential Museum—

you can Google me—

I get more hits than Charlie

(sometimes I'd like a hit of acid)

I did more drugs than Betty Ford

you know I was in a Broadway Musical?

Assassins

the actress wore a red dress

I'm more famous than anyone in my family

than anyone in _The Family_

except Charlie

Charlie, Charlie

I'm free now

I almost assassinated the President, Charlie

I'll come in my red dress

stab me, make me bleed

Benjamin Dombroski

### Because Your Questions on the Nature of Memory Have, at Times, Threatened My Buzz

Ahead, the coal train enters a long curve

and here we watch it slow

as if into the memory of curve. Below

the river courses through evening

and the island goes skeletal

in shadow. Woody

spit of land from which captured Federal troops

once watched this city burn—

a light not unlike tonight's lowering

on the horizon—and nothing grand

in those flames, what they promised

then; an end nearing

only in the slow exhaustion

that all fire reveals—ruins

to comb beneath empty

warehouse windows. It must be easier

here than at the yards upriver—

no one walking the rails,

cutting wide arcs of light

through the woods. So, from the balcony

we watch the boys creep through scrub pine

and up embankments, disappear

in the trains' chuffing.

You tell me you've known coal

the promise of heat. You've written it.

Heaped in car on car of freights

pulled easy along the rim of these bluffs,

I think of it as memory

of the mountains which held it.

Bored, these boys hop the trains,

only to leap from them when again they slow

through the far side of the city

on their eastward slide to the ports

at Hampton, the bay

and sea. Doubtless you've dreamed the sea

a kind of memory. And the coal,

which carries to the sea

the weight of mountains, wears tonight

ragged coats of melting snow.

Oh, frozen wards of snow

carried down the mountains.

Oh, motion. Oh, absence

and he longing for shapes

of things the snows have covered.

I reach for your glass and refill it.

I reach for the night and stars.

I reach for the train. Let us speak plainly

now—as the wind dies, and the noise;

as the tail end of it disappears

like a dark thread

pulled through evening.

My mother called yesterday

with news of the fourth

suicide this month:

a girl this time, who stepped in front

of the 5:38 carrying traders

home to their suburbs by the sea.

In her voice I heard the reach

toward what question

the child's mother must have asked.

No, she didn't ask it.

Nor have we talked of the others.

Though I know

she wonders. I wonder. You must wonder.

But we talk instead of a room

walked out of, row of empty dresses

hanging in a closet. Or laundry; the scent

of someone else's idea

of mountains in springtime.

If a mother needs answers, let her

find them. Let us have another drink.

And if we must speak of ghosts,

tonight they shall be the ghosts

of a boy's hands on a window as a train starts:

fingertip, palm-print and the world

pulled through them like a sheet.

Tie and rail bed, parking lot and platform clock.

Bright sheet of the world

through which a few gulls glide.

### South of Paris

. . . perhaps on a Thursday, as today is, in autumn.

—Cesar Vallejo

Horrid to die on a market day

in a foreign town, like this one

in the Loire valley, in November, with a light rain

passing its secrets to the slate roofs

and opened umbrellas.

How ill, beneath the plane trees

and between the stalls of vegetables

and strange meats,

the fish and foreign, fish-like faces,

among gestures of buying and selling

how black, even surviving the Thursday

after feeling suddenly behind you the presence

on the cobblestones

and balking at a case of aged cheese

before asking in broken tongue for a taste.

### Afternoon with My Nephew

Pushing your racecar through the grass,

you say, _shooo,_ the car says, _shooo._

The plane says, _grrrr_ overhead.

Its shadow is t-shaped, or boy shaped,

when older, you'll run with outspread arms

through a field. Its shadow says nothing.

The birds say _hello,_ even the buzzards say _hello,_

but you can't hear them, they're too high.

Their shadows are eaten by the air.

There are people in the plane, you know.

A pilot, yes, and passengers too.

What do they say? All kinds of things.

They're coming back from a war which isn't yet over.

And if they're talking about it

we don't hear them either, only the plane,

which keeps on saying the only word it knows.

Ryan Kerr

### Pulp

There are hours of tonguing the loose tooth

before I decide to remove it with my own fingers.

In my memory it feels much the same

as the resigned detachment of sectioning a grapefruit.

The same resistant tug of sinews

clinging either to ivory or the fleshy meat.

It is reluctant and stubborn,

bringing with it nerves and tissue,

coaxed by a child's impetuousness.

The dance of spit and blood

in the stainless steel sink.

The tooth is a lesson.

The pulp and papery matter of childhood.

The space of wistful, smiling mouths.

### Trimming

A knot on the middle finger,

formed when just a child

from gripping pencil and writing,

always writing. Here, the body altered

for the first time in an enduring way

that cannot be undone, as it grows

and calcifies over the decades.

Now littered scattershot over this

dusty landscape. A faint blemish

here where I sliced my hand open

cleaning the kitchen knife one night,

a cut under the eye with no history. Or follow the map

to this consequence of imprecise umbilical detachment.

A patch here of bedraggled forest,

dimpled, speckled birthmark.

The ohm that transcends these rough thistles

and cavernous valleys, thundering

their confidences solely, sadly to one another.

I perch on this mountain and wait

to discover a soft and small prick of inspiration.

### Vessel

You would like to see a peony in your budvase,

so you consider going out to clip one

from our neighbor's garden while she is away,

yet you also see it dying quietly in its ewer,

much the same as they do in the gardens.

When you realize that they will all be gone

by the end of May, you change your plans

to rhododendrons, hyacinths, hydrangeas.

We consider what plants will thrive in the shade

of the front yard and the burgeoning sun

in the back. We consider what areas of the yard

are richest or in greatest need. We push our fingers

into the dirt together, tilling and plodding to cultivate

something poignant and perfect. Planning

what to seed and what to pull. Engineering, hoping.

What blossoms will be the result of our architecture?

### "Every morning now I wake"

Every morning now I wake

and step into our failure

of a backyard,

to drink my coffee and consider

all things unfinished.

### Youth Apocrypha

I think back to my years

that were dedicated to frivolity

and hope that it is not a thing

to be throttled out of my own children.

I seek to fall in step now

behind the smoking teenagers,

not to chide, but to capture

some ephemeral part of my youth

when I sat across from friends at

barroom tables discussing stories

as though they were the only things

that mattered. Which they were.

Which they are. These toppled pieces

that lie today like ice cubes

spilled out of a short glass,

spinning wildly before melting.

Josh Flaccavento

### Glen Canyon Dam

Wherever there's an Indian walking

backwards, she says, there's rain. Rachel

on the nametag. Navajo. Some of this land

must be hers, somehow.

You're from Virginia, she says, do you know

West Virginia? The New Gorge River? Their

bridge is like ours, ours is second

only to theirs. New

River Gorge, I say. Yes.

Design and style. We're all

standing here—spillways

tunnels turbines tracks

for massive gantry crane—because

of design and style, she

tells us. Thin man, Midwestern, plus

wife. British couple, pensioners. Three

German boys, no good

English. Sister. Self. Last

tour of the day.

Please do not take pictures

of security. Do you need that #

in in. ft. mi. lbs?

Volumes. Pressures. Rates of flow in

m/s. Yes, you may

photograph this observation gallery. See

the water pooling in corners floors

on concrete? It is constantly

analyzed, an engineered

leak.

Grass like golf

course, not

orchard. No trees

here. These men

most highly skilled in the world.

Please observe their images. Ask

me any questions you want about

power water Western

space the science

of how this land was

reclaimed the science

of control.

### I Sing Now of This

highway, commonplace and

deadly as time. Signs

mark the miles. They are my

companions and we are

gentlemen of the road. Seconds

crushed under the tires. Blood

and fur punctuate its

interminable sentence, the

flat expanse of hours

black yellow stabbed through

with rain and neon. Curves of

unrequited space pull at my eyes

drag hands and arms, entire

bodies. Calamity of place

less

ness, trauma of location

ripped pulled stretched.

Jagged stroke of light exposing

once-dark innards of mountain

range, spikes of valley ridge

scape. I sing its limit

less

ness, eternity of

motion hurtling tumbling over

boneyards ruins bridges, under

cloud-shadows and sundogs.

If I must burn the world to be free

then burn.

### We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone

Here's what's gonna happen, she

shouts over jukebox country, 1 a.m.

Renegade bar, Beaver, Utah.

Anybody I ain't servin

is goin home. That's

fucking

it. I've

had

enough. Need me

to walk you to the door?

Old cowboys a few fat

Latinos antagonists

of this one-woman

shift. She'd rather

the table of ladies

in the back, brother

boys with skateboards

balanced by the door

or us, perhaps, two

out-of-town kids, quiet

polite, silent laughter and six

dollar tip. Just

smoke, ghosts

passing through Patty's

Friday night

leaving without

a trace.

### A scrape

One of dozens, almost

indistinguishable at first

glance. A wound

got in fun, a simple

mistake. You

should've known better than

slowing stopping braking raw tips of

white fingers versus river current

Rio Grande Algodones after

noon. Now

new cut new scrape new

wound of what

type laceration avulsion

pulled-back flap of flesh hiding

interiors of blood and nervous

the actual finger the stuff of all fingers

can't fight tides with fingers, not these

picked-over pulled-at peeled plucked the places

of dozens of simple wounds,

mistakes. Indistinct anxiety

made manifest.

Christine Stroud

### Grandmother

Damp heat rises from the grass.

I sing your name like conjugating a verb:

dolo, dolore, Dolores

until you say _Shush,_

It's not polite to call

me by my name.

By the wild grape orchard,

in the backyard,

we stretch out in the hammock

strung between two pines.

You read the Nancy comics aloud

from the Sunday _Greenville Times_ ,

while my eyes trace the illustrations.

Your fingers, filmed with cornbread

grease, stain the pages.

I squash a chubby bumble bee

in my fist and wipe

the brown smudge into the white

clover creeping through

the grass. I want you to say

I am brave, but you click

your tongue and shake your head.

### My Last Spanking

After church, in my great grandma's dark oak bedroom, Dad helps me change. _Arms up_ he orders and pulls the yellow dress with white lace collar over my head. One quick movement like he's peeling off a dried scab. He hands me a bright orange pair of shorts. I am seven, and stand in front of grandma's large mirror with my arms straight out. Long and thin, I pretend I am a little Jesus on the cross. Head tilted to the side. I poke out my white belly and giggle. _Dad, look I'm like one of those little starving babies in Africa_. He searches my miniature lime green suitcase for a T-shirt. _Hon, that's not nice._ I push out my belly farther. _But I do_. _See, little skinny arms and a big fat belly,_ I say. He stops pushing around my clothes and looks at me in the mirror. _I said stop it._ But I'm feeling good and strong, stretching my arms as far as the will go, pushing my belly out as hard as I can _._ Again I tilt my head to the side. _Look, now I'm Jesus._ I am over his lap before I can back away or say sorry. The sound is dull, dampered by my shorts. My muscles flex, but I don't cry.

After, Dad leaves the room, his face the color of a cardinal. I stare into the mirror, puff out my belly, clench my fists, whisper _African baby_.

### From Man to Man, 1973

Somewhere in the house

her bulldog-faced father

is angry. Not at her,

not yet, but at her sister

who's forgotten to wipe

speckles of toast crumbs

from the black and white

checkered counter top.

Her little brother

is sitting cross-legged

in front of the TV,

watching _Gunsmoke_.

The cowboys shoot Indians

in varying shades of gray.

Her bedroom door is closed.

She stares into the mirror

of her chalk-white vanity,

parts her hair

down the middle, pulls

it into pigtails.

She braids each side into thick

ropes of oiled hemp. The black

hair against her milky face

and white linen shirt

make her think of Dorothy

before she discovers Oz.

Today is September,

she is engaged.

_My husband_ she says over

and over. Quiet then loud,

mouthing the word _hus - band_

with exaggerated lips. Somewhere

in the house her father

yells at her mother

who is peeling the husks

off pale ears of corn.

She can't hear her mother's reply.

But the girl in the room

doesn't care. She's leaving soon

with a man, her husband.

It's not because he drives

a little orange motorcycle,

or has butter colored hair, longer than hers.

It has nothing to do with the burning

red zits along his jawline

that he fingers like braille,

each pimple pulsing,

ready to explode.

It's because he is a hurricane

that will breeze out of this town.

Just like her mother says,

He's going places.

### From Man to Man, 2009

In the cream colored carpet,

asphalt-granite counter tops,

a house with no sounds,

she applies the thick

Darkest Dark Brown

to her coarse white roots.

The chemical smell singes

her nose hair, eyes swell.

She stares in the bathroom

mirror, large over the pearly

his-and-her sinks.

Her husband is at work.

His cell phone is off,

always gone someplace.

A husband with a saggy,

pale stomach. His hair fine

like thread, gray as ash. She waits.

Thirty minutes for the dye,

two hours until her husband

comes home. She stares

in the bathroom mirror

and whispers _thirty-six_

_years._ Somewhere

in the house, there is a photo

of a boy with butter colored

hair, cut shorter than hers,

in a black tuxedo and white

cake cream smeared on his face.

Somewhere in the house

there is a photo of her

in a wedding dress,

staring straight into the lens.

### I Kiss Someone Else at the Party

From my desk I hear liquid dripping to the hard wood floor, steady and deliberate like a leaky faucet. The cat jumps off the bed as I scream, _no—goddammit!_ You come upstairs as I'm yanking off the sheets, _she pissed on the bed_ , I say. You shake your head; _let me get the baking soda._ The pee leaves the white mattress looking like a smoker's tooth. We sprinkle the Arm and Hammer over the stain. As the powder dries, it cakes and crumbles, but the stain is still there. I mix bleach and water in a spray bottle and douse the splotch. Every few hours I spray more and by night time the stain is almost gone. You rub my back, _good job, you can hardly tell._ Later that night neither of us can sleep. We both stare at the ceiling and listen to the fan whirl on low. I whisper, _I think I can still smell it._ In the darkness I see your head nod up and down, _yeah me too._

Abraham Moore

### Inadvertent Landscape

Two voices,

two black rectangles of voice,

one little lung, carpet.

They're changing the garbage in the lobby

behind him. I disagree.

The word doesn't do that.

### There are Places Where We are Unwelcome

My scapula twitched and burned like a cymbal

the night she put her tongue in my ear.

The room had charisma, small appliances, nice drapes.

I forget the times she called me an asshole

And it begins to rain disfigured little faces outside.

I worry the forecast, paltry glasswares, stomach pumps,

I worry ticket stubs.

My lip cracks and bleeds on my beer can.

The black walnut tree sheds all over the lawn.

Everyone at the party smells like turpentine.

Later it feels like we're sleeping but when I close my eyes

I wake up and all I can think of is pale skin,

scissors, a playful thorn inside a quiet word,

the bird outside, one squawk of possession,

of unknowing narcissism, of breath.

### Armed Only With Our Sense of Degradation as Human Beings

Our hands hold the vase that holds the train together for just

this moment before the train shatters and the clasp

is no longer a human clasp. It's a beast, or the outline of a person,

or the idea of a self as a shattered line of a wrecking train.

I feel like the vagrant who left the stolen bicycle on the tracks

to derail the train while I pissed into the screaming brush.

### We Want to Have Been

Cormorant,

this word of you, afterthought of stolen

second-hand clothing, this soft public address

concerns my lungs. You're kinked neck in flight

spills the ghosts of Shane's open, soft hand,

of empty Fairbanks bottles, Stephanie's

blind eye, all over the couch. I keep slipping on them.

I wish they loved us. They used to be us:

dissolved into stretched-out moments, eating salads.

We lean on the barrel of nights' waiting tantrums.

We feel, want to become, or to have been the ghosts,

to scavenge some before-man groan of waking

under the sad little fruit trees.

### Horizon

the small way the power lines divide the white-orange trees

the small way of a car alarm— distant guard-rail thin, and mad

near the overpass— a woman pulling hard on her

own hair in the breeze-pocket of a train station

Chris Haug

Brueghel's Bouquet  
1603

Deep hues of brown hold explosions

of scarlet, pink, and eerie blue with force

enough to keep them eternally blooming,

their leaves green now for four hundred years;

meanwhile, four envious pale-white tulips struggle

to fully open, trying to remember the strange

taste of air back when they were just small

dark buds fracturing the frost-covered loam.

### Behold, his Enemies Low at his Feet

There are men here and there to whom the whole of life is like an after-dinner hour with a cigar: easy, pleasant, empty, perhaps enlivened by some fable of strife . . .

—Joseph Conrad

Defender of junior executives and over-forty

gym-rats, you range wide over our jungled

streets, patrolling our every storefront ensuring

that both bears and bulls stay safely in their dens.

Slayer of the numbskulled, you've mastered splitting

the hairs of every hairline, no matter how humble,

for while one hand keepeth both the fire and flood

at bay, the other gooseth the discontented housewife

even as her dough-brained husband boils

in a hot-tub of aged bourbon, benevolently

sacrificing himself to the primitives who would have

inevitably run off with both their fortunes

had you not been here to save them.

### Cow with Parasol

Being ogled is nothing new

when you're a flower-loving cow

with a furry blue face and tiny red wings,

but hiding isn't the reason

for the parasol (in case you're

wondering, I just like it is all).

When they passed on the path

high above me, the sun, higher still,

was mostly blocked, and for a moment

I felt safe—which was puzzling

since I was sure they were looking

and probably making silent notes

about my extravagances.

Then, unavoidably, the sun moved,

and I knew I'd soon see

them, and not just their silhouettes

but everything from their ill-fitting shoes

right down to their tar-

stained moustaches—

and so, I'm left with no

other choice: move on

and dream of finding a cave so dark

you'd never know if the colorless

moss was smiling back or snarling.

### Stiletto

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing . . .

Walking up an empty downtown street,

I'm holding a snow-white 20-ounce

paper cup emblazoned with a fair-trade, organic

hunter-green siren who sings herself

into a short-skirted, six-foot-tall barista

with sad, smoky eyes who overflows

her corporate-issued button-up

and weeps as she gently chokes

the stringy neck of a grease-stained landfill

attendant. Loosening her grip, she smiles,

and whispers, "Maybe everything is double-edged . . ."

Descending from the cup (or maybe,

it's my mind, or the ocean; who can know?),

she's now the petite, raven-haired woman

standing beside me wearing acutely illogical pumps

which are silver tipped and rival the skyline.

They stab the shadows of her legs

as she struts confidently away from me

before pausing on the corner as the last shaft

of sunlight disappears behind fiscal temples.

A tiny music seems to swell as she tilts

her head heavenward to gather

up all of the whispers of the City of Man,

conjuring them into a thin film

which winds itself around her

until she's iridescent—all fiery-black

lipstick wrapped in feathers,

balanced on a single limb—

some sort of strange crane,

a totem of pain and beauty

perched on a lily pad

of garbage-stained concrete.

### A Kiss on her Birthday

She can make out

what is probably a fence

from the corner

of her one opened eye.

But with only one eye open,

she cannot be sure;

two might better grasp

what floats almost invisible

under the white window shade.

It's just like in Chagall's painting:

see, his happiness

doesn't need to be deduced.

With his eyes closed

and head twisting backward

he's left continuity behind;

gravity's hold holds him not.

He's of the sublime—a gentle kite

longing to be stuck in her tree.

In her hand the flowers

he bought her,

on the table a cake,

knife and money-purse.

She can feel them all,

all straining for another dimension,

but depth is illusive.

And that one eye,

open and empty,

keeps staring out at who knows what—

not him, that's sure.

Maybe this bothers him,

but with his eyes closed,

will he ever know?

Perhaps; outside, that fence—

it persists

regardless

of the cake and kisses

and the floating husband.

Mariah Blankenship

### Fiberglass Madonna

Barbie was in her twenties I'd say

when we used to sew her clothes

on your Singer look-alike

back room of your maternal trailer

stitching time, saving none

I'd insist on bringing her

to the shower with us and she would

bathe in the Amazon River Basin created

from the drainage of your hair

and I would braid her hair

like your motorcycle hair sitting

there at your ankle

under the fall of your cleansed body

And her perfect plastic features

were a replica of you

reflecting in the basin

where a Narcissus flower once bloomed

and Adonis once bled into

the brushed nickel drain

Even your breasts were as plastic as hers

those same warrior breasts

but you fell down the drain of wisdom,

of vitality,

a break in the river current

And Barbie was fully clothed

when you tried to stitch yourself

together in an institute for the imperfect,

communicating with your Singer look-alike,

Sexton at her typewriter

You were in your twenties, I'd say,

when you drowned,

Anticlea at the river

And we are bathing eternally,

showering Madonna statue of

mother daughter Barbie

with your blood forever pouring over us

Barbie, that whore, lying naked in the drain

### Lexapro Shortage

I am here to see a counselor today,

rotten psychology stinks to high hell

in my mind left on a shelf for 20 years

Bring me science

Bring me God

Anything but psychology

We came here together once,

you and I on the ironic love seat

I am staring at that brown seat now

It growls at me

I approach it like an enumerable caravan to my grave

and startled, I turn to the black, more appropriate colored chair,

holding the clipboard of my subconscious tight,

like a tiger you would say

And you are no longer here

They ask for an emergency contact now

and my God,

I have had an epiphany

I have no emergency contact now

Perhaps that is the worst of it

A permanent check mark next to divorced,

A blank next to emergency contact

They're all deceased, I say

(euphemism for rotting in graves

below Whitman's democratic grass

Shut up

This is why you are here in the first place)

And my mother is damn sure in the painting

on the wall staring at me with an oil painted tear

mocking me for being like her

but there's no bullet in my head

no trickle of blood on my temple

just an empty loveseat

### A Barren Grave, Walden Pond

I grow from the earth

as though houses were

formed on the eighth

day, emerging from

the dust like women

built from ribs.

Emerson, I join you

in the real houses

of this world,

the ones that

envelop the bottom

tier of gravity—

a pyramid of pressure,

our homes sprout

from the dirt under

our fingernails—

from atoms,

from bacteria,

from nothing.

The earth formed

deliberately from

the cabin and not

the other way

around, Thoreau.

I am a house,

empty,

barren of furniture

and my windows

are closed,

Venetian blinds

shut, smiling back

at me like Plath's

tulips perched

on her windowsill,

they mock me.

Still I sit,

emerged from

the earth like

a cracked

politician.

I lie to ecology.

Emily Hyland

### The Hit

When Daiquane is eighteen years old

and two months into his eleventh-grade year

he is hit by two chabóns who drive with intention.

They drive a Toyota Celica, green like the trees, which

do not line the block, the trees that smell like summers

Daiquane watches on TV. Even if there were trees

like along those downtown blocks with tulips at the roots, they would

just seem invisible against the place he calls home.

Trees seem everywhere in his dreams.

In a recurring cycle of sleep, when he still

lived with his mother and could still feel the heat

of angry words on her breath

when she pulled the sheets over him at night,

so soon as he would close his eyes, he would climb the pines—

besotted by limbs like ladder rungs—up

toward some other dimension.

It is a desert of death when they are through. They have

hit him once to knock him to the ground—

heavy teenage trunk uprooted—rims aglitter in the lamplight,

and then turned around—

right wheels upon the curb in the sharp swing

back towards the fallen, to cruise over

his skull and away,

into the night,

dicks hard

with the ache of adrenaline.

### Gray Matter

I finish reading Bessie's murder out loud

on the day I get assaulted at school.

There is a sudden hand-to-weave hair-fight

that descends upon the classroom

over an inadvertent brush-by

in the doorway over lip gloss

and then I try to talk one girl

off the ledge of this mania—

we are in a putrid corner of the hallway now—

my white arms out long

to lock her away from all of this

misdirected fury, and

her hands lunge into my chest

magnetize and stick

while a dewy, halcyonic mist

blurs action from cognition.

And it's not the falling back as much as

the way the flesh of my breasts inverts

under the heels of her Dorito-licked hands

and the furnace-minded charge of

_that_ anger,

which meets me

through the muscle-jolt

of a girl who lacks

plain agency:

_that_ makes my feet lose the floor

and topple.

I hear some communal

gasp; someone whispers

"She pushed _Ms._ _Emily"_

and their eyes say

I am more sacrosanct

than the girl who is

bleeding from her skull-skin

in the other room

or the other in front of me

who they can already barely see

anymore. This truculent breast-push

is the apogee of violence in my life—

Bigger's hands slide

onto Mary's rum-beat

breasts, his hands

touch Bessie's breasts,

resigned. Her hands slam

mine, so that

she is Bigger and

I am Mary and Bessie

and I am Bigger, too, and she

is Mary and Bessie

and she

and I

just tumble into a cycle

of perpetual subjugation

that stretches across

a span of score in which

we are all perpetrators

because of what we are born into

and trapped by the prophesy

that contains each iota

of our

inevitable lives.

### I'd Had A Long Day

1.

In the basement, the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid

finally had it out for their countries. As beef patties

flew around the cafeteria like saucers,

the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid

fused and rolled into the hallway.

The half-dressed throngs from the locker rooms

and sweaty jerseys from the gym spilled forth

by way of intuition and chatter; they

salivated for the primacy of action. The whole building

turned in and over itself; children sluiced down the stairwells

towards inevitable circumstance.

By the time the school safety agents

rounded up and lollied down

like a troop of Shakespearian boobies, enough time had passed

for the wheels to have stopped. And when they

neared the Haitian kid and the Jamaican kid, motion

was already invisible.

In the epicenter was a mess of stress, and the agents

stiffened up at the sight. One child dialed 9-1-1 on his cell, but

reception was poor in the basement

and his voice too still for the responder.

When the EMT crew did descend upon the spot,

the gym teacher stood up from holding in the blood

somewhere along the curve where neck meets shoulder,

where the scissors still stuck in. His clothes

looked like sheets of symmetrical inkblots. He looked—

in his sweatpants—as if he had just emerged

from messily painting a house.

After lockdown, after the coroner

packed the Jamaican kid into a bag and stole

out of the school in a whisper, and after the news cameras

snuck glances through the windows into

our emergency faculty meeting,

I found myself glazed on the train platform at Utica.

2.

Two young brothers and their younger sister walk past me.

Their sneakers blink red each time their feet hit the concrete, except

the sister's, which blink pink and silver glitter. We are all

near the end of the platform and the air is dank. I've had a long day,

and I think that to myself while rubbing my eyes

with my fingers as the kids walk by.

The boys stop on either side of their sister. They

look like her bodyguards. They stand on the bumpy yellow strip,

which is too close to the platform edge. They are not

her bodyguards. She is little. I think

she is good at math. They eye each other and then

grab their sister, one brother at each of her arms. She is

squirming, but they hold strong, inching

closer to the rim. They start to hold her over.

Her feet are trying for the edge, pointing down and

straining back. I've had enough today. I

muster up the teacher voice. "Excuse me, gentlemen,"

I say. "Put her down. Right. Now.

Don't think I won't ride home with you

and tell your mother what just went on."

They are back on the platform now, all feet

on concrete. I say, "Stand by the wall." Their sister

slides towards me. The older of the brothers

pulls her back by the handle of her Dora knapsack.

"Young man!" My voice is shrill like my mother

when we climbed too high in the pine trees.

" _Do not_ touch her again."

"Whatchu gonna do bout it?"

I am red as that puddle near the gym now.

"Come here and stand with me," I say to her. "My name is Emily."

The younger brother is looking down at his shoes now. The other one

goes on, "Miss Emily, see—we Bloods. My boy Pumpkin gonna

fuck you up. We gonna ride the train

and follow _you_ home."

He holds up a machine gun made of the air and

chouk-chouk-chouk-chouk-chouks me

with the fantastic spray of his imagination.

After the gunfire subsides, I look him in the eyes.

"I know what I'm gonna do with you," I say.

I gently put my tote bag on the ground. "Fuck

off already lady," he whines.

We are only a foot apart. He is small, around seven. I

lunge in, lift him hard under the armpits, and walk him

to the platform edge.

I can feel the grooves

of the yellow strip beneath my feet like

root-knolls on a trail. I can feel rushes of blood

surge into my elbows as his weight tests my arms,

outstretched.

I can feel the humid breeze from the tunnel

hit my wicked face as nearing headlights

expose the rusty tracks below us.

### To Ms. Olds

When I am writing in my room

I leaf through a womb of yours

crawl into the purplish bruise

and hope my thoughts turn lucid,

that this femininity waxes meaningful,

that I am bleeding ovaries, that

I talk to my children in dreams

where I am running through ferns

to discover them inside me someday.

That I had sex, too, and practiced

speaking of this pastoral body.

I find some space of yours

in a splash of blood; your sister

peed on you—my sister's head hit

the coffee table spinning

and I was soaked. It seemed like

pomegranates exploded into rain

and she was dripping. I laughed

at my father when he cried and sat

with my mother over _her_ cottage cheese

and disorders, watched her slam a feeble

fist into the glass atop the kitchen table

because I wouldn't use a fork

to eat my sushi. I am a part

of this Freudian demeanor—the long hair

down my spine like man-o-war tendrils

ready to shock or choke any toucher,

the glasses that keep me one wall

from my meeting Baudrillard—

this poetry is a matrix of movers

and your speaker is some

anthropomorphic women

trapped on the page like

the woman in the yellow

hedges of insomnia, crazed

she didn't have the audacity to jump.

February 29th

It was early. I was standing

on the platform at 72nd street

waiting for the 1 train to arrive. I was

reading about meeting the things

that scare you. The book was

blue with a black trim

and the first page had a pleasurable texture

and was patterned in an interlocking chain

that made it look like wrapping paper

one might use

to wrap a bottle of scotch

for a grandfather

or journal for a

nascent father.

The train flew in

and a man standing

too close to the platform edge let himself

fall in front of it. He twisted

to lie back against

the face of the train for a moment

so he could hold a new perspective

and then tumbled under

as the train lurched into

the stillness of the emergency.

All women on the platform

started screaming. I

started screaming. I started screaming

from some place inside

that doesn't even discern

the why of it. I felt

a shock of silver

shoot down

through my organs

as if my body set off a flash

and my memory

snapped a picture of the feeling

to store in the place that

registers the viscerals.

I kept looking around hoping

to see someone I knew to share

in the fear of it all

and when nobody registered

I hugged my book against

my breast so tightly that

my fingers were cold

when I released. I heard

the conductor's voice

over the loud speaker indicate

there were delays on

the 1 train and that

the express train,

whose doors were open

across the platform,

would run local. I walked into

an almost empty car

and a woman with sunglasses on

and green hospital scrubs

hugged me into her arms

and rubbed my back. She

sat me down. She kept

repeating "It's okay. Calm

down. It's okay." The train

was there as

a sitting room. His

body seemed

to collapse

into the moment of its death

as if it knew relief

was coming. There was

no fear in his posture, nor

steadfastness in his spine. He

fell like a limp fish. His coat

was olive and beige and

his blue jeans looked flaccid like water.

I did not look into the woman's eyes

who consoled me. I did not ask

her name. I said "I need to go up

to the street," and I walked

towards the stairs. I had been waiting

at the end of the platform

for the back of the train

so had to walk

the length of the suicide

in order to exit. People

were crowded around where

the man was under the train wheels

trying to peer into his life.

All of the people exited the train.

They wore blank expressions

through the doors and did not know

the reason for the abrupt end

to their journey. Nobody was

in control. Some new commuters

were walking onto the platform.

The express train left. I walked

onto the street and called Matt

right away. I was sobbing and hiccupping

among the suits. I told him

I loved him and then

walked the 12 blocks up to work.

Sam Pittman

### Growth Memory

A cluster of hungry cells on my chest racks a bill

Fit to pay for a martyr's resurrection. Conjecture

Alone could prove my innocence. Hive mind of the body.

My body is not my body when the hill is still raised

In my skin's memory. I'm poised, aching to pick

At phantom cancer, wanting to have hoed this row myself

But knowing one must unthink such ambition. To myself

I've mailed a letter, no return address. What works is to pick

A font I've never used. Anyway, I was raised

On shirtless pleas in cardboard California, where a body

Is worth what it can sell. But forgetting's all conjecture.

Besides, I'm in the mirror when the envelope arrives. It's a bill.

### Another Stupid Question

Did the doctors sedate her or had she drugged herself?

The toaster starts talking in tongues and even I know

to risk a burnt ear to listen. The papers mention battle

but when the woman, a learned dropout, comes to,

she'll see signs meaning bottle. Had she read more

Agatha than Emily she would have said I _imagined it_ ,

said I was _seeing things_. Her monument in the closet,

a box the color of potatoes, or so many crushed insects,

or her memory the sound of a cannon traced in midair.

The lines "said I imagined it, / said I was seeing things" are borrowed from Agatha Christie's Three Act Tragedy: "What does Mrs. Dacres say?" "Says I imagined it. Says I was 'seeing things.'"

### Imaginary Vigil for My Mother

In the city they go on about marriage.

The three-walled studio, a hollow darkroom

Where the same negative outlives each new bite

Of the shutter. 1: Tawny couch with hemp blankets.

2: Tented blankets of hemp over tawny couch. 3: Hemp

Blanketed, couch tawny. A swingtop full of vodka

Prisming the light before it reaches the urn.

She made sure to say this and that was vulgar.

If she knew I lived in the city and went on

About marriage, went on about marriage, went

On and on about marrying another man, surely,

_Surely_ , this or that bottle would be close to empty.

### Daily Burial

I am the urn

itself. As I wane

my cells eat

me up. Deep

belly pocket

hordes my body

in long quiet

vigil. Hunger of

phagocyte

army sucking

poison for good.

What prayer

stops intent

burn or flood

in dark empty

porcelain neck?

Flick of fast

dream ghost

from in my

boiling bellies.

Again the rote

swallow, sweep.

Again, blind

mouth, again.

### A Brother's Love

We'll see what holds your interest.

I'll lock the front, you the back,

making sure to leave no hair,

pubic, otherwise, or prints.

Take the pillow, whatever

you want to call it, to rest

the feet, the head: we don't want

you overworked. Remember

the betting system? For all

we know this never happened.

When everyone leaves, you can

clean the room so it's ready.

Alex Linden

### Family Tree Says:

Our ancestors cannot be touched. They sleep

with lights blaring. Their bodies

become centripetal, moving always toward

their houses of death. The snap

of their flat shoes against wood mimics

each floating moment:

a horse gives birth to twins and vibrates

feverishly. Her body's cadence sends

my grandfather into a panic: his truck careens

into a ditch. He quits downing brown

liquor in the afternoon.

What I'm trying to say is that

clocks sync predictably.

My mother grew in the country, in

the country's country, embedded in a field

of corn or a mine. In the aching farm

house the dogs could not quit mouthing

their versions of truth.

Look: either this is true or it isn't.

One day a man entered my mother's house, axe

in hand, copper-handed, hands like glass

or a spider unwinding. The German Shepherd sank

into him from behind.

In that moment she wasn't a dog.

Family Tree says: apparitions become real

once they are spoken of.

This man became my father

or a ghost or both. He became

a transient I knew in Tempe, Arizona. The hot

crackle of that state melted his shoes. He became

a transient I knew in Dallas or Oklahoma and

he spoke with a lilt. He became so transient

that in his disappearance clocks whined

and refused to be wound. Lights moved as animals; blue

ness became obsolete. The ground under

my feet soared upward like a chime and I

only knew concrete things: pendulums click trochaic, loop

always back to simple paths.

### The Blues of In-Between

A woman flicks

a pinch of hair between her lips

every 28 seconds.

I am counting the interval

and I can't stop.

On the bus I am trying to decode family signs

but there is no clicking, no machinery.

Finally, in a deafening moment

something prompts a recollection:

father throws tennis shoes onto the ruddy porch

(thank God sister isn't too heavy to carry).

I can punch the wall if a person deserves punching.

(Keep the doors locked and we might be fine).

Our tires are slashed in the theatre parking lot.

(Mother says _mother_ but won't finish the word).

On the bus I anticipate

this hair-eating woman like a downbeat.

I know her like myself

if I were to misplace my teeth.

She grinds those exposed bones like a ritual.

Her daughter is eight, obese, she's

combed her own hair into two neat pigtails.

She offers her doll to everyone.

This bus is going to:

a. Disneyland

b. The neighborhoods we grew up in (we're too good for them now).

c. the white and violent blocks we assume

will stress fracture our feet.

In another world, mother brushes her teeth

an hour per day.

She says _People are judged_ _by the shape of their mouths,_

as a woman you must accept this in order to move up, and out.

### Body Murmur

What luck to live

next to a harpist,

to learn through symbiosis

the callus behind the nail

and the trail of the fingers,

brush of nylon or wire.

I was so busy counting the specks

of dust in the atmosphere

which attach to a droplet

and freeze in their descent

that I forgot to call it _snow_

and lost the concept of any name,

of any drifting through my window.

Yet even after winter's release

I begged for a moment whose atoms

could not materialize,

and when I knew you, those bending

strings across my ribcage, had gone

I got going on myself,

yet held this hereditary

pathogen, some incalculable integer,

and it pulsed forth a blood-born

murmur, rushed from your chest

toward a stethoscope, through my window,

through my chest.

### Trading Sacrifices

1.

As a child I watch her stop traffic.

May brings indelicate heat.

The ground cracks into a puzzle.

We walk hand in hand

through the parking lot

of a grocery store named Smitty's.

The butcher is in love with my mother,

he is getting a divorce.

I think about this as he meticulously cuts meat.

I see words as shapes, hear names and picture foods.

His name, David, is pepperoni.

I am some type of pasta

and Diana is cantaloupe.

We are playing this game in the parking lot

and David turns to wave goodbye.

Distracted, I do not see the car barrel toward me.

My wrist becomes a rope.

I turn in time to see her shoulder jam

into the side of a stranger's car.

2.

At twenty-four I watch her fall.

I am driving across the Great Plains.

Last night after I heard she swallowed a bottle of pills

I lapped whiskey from the bottle.

The only time I cry is when I think of the Mormons

who touched oil to my head, a gift from a friend.

I do think of this, and the car nearly flies

from the road.

I clutch the can in my hand and it is her shoulder.

It cuts my palm.

From this moment forward I can't remember

much of the drive, except the barrels of hay

rising up from each hill like roughened knuckles,

drumming the beats of our collision.

### Retroverted Uterus

When the baby came all

pale and thin flecks

of cotton floated through

the air and I told the girl

all of my names. I asked

my husband to fill his

hands with the drifting

cotton but he said

its texture, like that of

chalk, would render him

weak and queasy.

I recalled, then, the time

I almost fell in love

with someone else:

the next day

I puked until my stomach

bruised, until I could

feel my abdomen growing

taut and southward, pushing

my uterus into its compliant

position—crowding it

up against my spine. When

I explained my situation

to the male gynecologist

he told me I should quit

sit-ups and nausea and focus

more on cardio, and my child.

Even still, sometimes when I hold

my daughter I feel my uterus

nudging along my vertebrae

and for the life of me

I cannot decide if it's a threat

or a dance.

### Creating Distances and Asteroids

She leapt too soon.

In Amsterdam I pretended her death.

I slept not alone but scattered across the hotel.

I left notes: bobby pins, straws,

a man and a pink bra.

I pretended as the plane touched down.

I worried about papers to grade.

She wouldn't set foot on a plane,

didn't trust the churning

in the air and under her feet.

Did I admire suicide until my mother

tried it on?

In the weeks after her scattered pills

I imagined her carrying oyster shells,

shucking them bare-handed, loving

a pearl, loving a cut finger—but no,

that was me in New Orleans eating

the aphrodisiac, drinking the aphrodisiac

with a solid man who didn't

know my mother.

She leapt too soon.

Is she touching down now?

In Tucson I remembered her birthplace.

I buried the thought of her and wandered

the tired desert.

Fallen spines cracked under my feet, permeated

the dual soles.

I pretended in every corner of the world,

lapped up her sickness

and let it become molasses.

•

Sometimes I awake at 3 a.m

and see that an asteroid

has grown between my teeth.

I spit—just softly—and watch it sink

deep into the ground between us.

Bobby Lynn Taylor

### Lift

The component of the total aerodynamic force acting on an airfoil or on an entire aircraft or winged missile perpendicular to the relative wind and normally exerted in an upward direction, opposing the pull of gravity: lift. (<http://www.thefreedictionary.com/lift>)

When the air above moves faster than the air below: lift.

I'm shaping my wings, now that spring is here, I don't fear the cold as much: lift.

And when those voices say that I am trapped in some yesterday, when they crowd in on me while dancing in their Easter clothes: lift.

Drive me down into the ground? No. I've grown there before; I've torn out my roots running from that hammer on my head. The faces, the tiny me in retreat, No, that will not work: lift.

Whether it be Jesus or Buddha or Ginsberg or Hank Williams or Van Gogh; or coffee or masturbation or calculations or predestination: lift.

With big metal forks that move under two ton palates wanting them placed somewhere else; the hydraulics working, the battery sending out its power to the point of transference: lift.

And these anti-humans, with their bloat and their blame, blasting past the gospels in their chariots of gold leaf—trying to impress the crowd—they notice if you're loud: lift.

Lift me out

by my own power

in these last hours

of bondage to, through, and true—

Lift me, Sift me, Riff me like a jazz break on a Saturday night

with nothin' left to lose

nothin' but the blues

and a whole lot of chains around my neck and back and ears and nose and mouth

Lift

Lift

Lift

### Neon

twenty-five gallons of vanilla ice-cream

40,000 freckles

six ounces of orange hair

I stood out

so clean, so white, so perfect

straight A's in math and science

but not p.e., or english, or history

don't ask me to remember correctly

or to live in my body

and you won't be disappointed

the things I remember clearly

are private

still

the deacons's daughter

maybe thirteen

I wanted in a wholesome way

until

the deacon's son

told me how

he had sex with his sister

when they were alone

I believed him

I did not think of it

as incest

or rape

then

I wanted her more

when I learned that

she was dirty

like me

I did not have to pretend to be righteous

anymore

I wanted to see her holy naked sin

that's all I could think about

for years

I was ashamed

I had been

so

naive

she chose my best friend

sat by him

during church

I still wanted her

when I was pumping

the girl

who gave me

accommodating

sex

she wasn't bad

she just wasn't

wrong

enough

I fed the lust

neon

liquor, lies, dope, and smoke

sunday morning spirit

saturday night binges

with guitar

philosophy

prophecy

olympic drinking

I pressed my brain

into a vice

of throbbing

flesh

a light, at long lost love last

sin into zen

I graduated my body

through the bedrooms

I needed

to qualify me

if I ever

found myself

alone

with the deacon's daughter again

she sent me a friend request

last night

lit up in cyber

neon

### Red

Jammer-slammed and welded

into the air

fire sand invisible to the human eye

Watch the velmen hide

and sleep 'til the storm passes

I cared too much

I tried to give you my arm

for a pillow

for a shelter

We both were lost

breathing in the red

exhaling our ghosts into the sidewalk

it doesn't mean

it shouldn't mean

it has to mean

This is the end of our

carbon date

The particles are infusing now

adhering to the helix

changing our DNA

blisters of gold are rising up on the inside of our veins

This is the curse of the high country

when the air is tripped

on a wire

-set for measuring fools

Fools who are only ignorant

of the symnobolic rattle of synotics

rebute the robaakan

rhindal the wrecautious

We have regumed our lungs with Red

### It is Opening

Out in the streets

shouting

into vacant cracks of midnight

dust and garbage

piled up in a scab

gray scaly skin

breaking apart

the ground up

the living veins

sleeping beast wakes

we thought dead

It is opening

all those who know the power

are praising the day

stopping

putting off

letting go

the corporate kings go without

for a while

Let them wait

It will be a while

before they realize we are missing anyway

the managers will notice

try and make everyone stop rushing

to the portal

Then

when that fails

they fear for their jobs

run to tell their bosses

Bosses

sleeping off

last night's feast of fools

They get rich when it is closed

but it is opening

It is opening

a vagina stretching out

making ready to deliver

bread meat wine

to people

living

on corporate cans

of potted meat

left over from butcher parties

D. Ellis Phelps

### Five Poems

i

i wake

the night

screaming

in this house:

a man

—my father—

stands

where he

should not

be in

the door

—a sheath

—a sheet

covering

**~**

i wake

the night

screaming

in this house:

he

—coming—

in the front

door

not locked

not safe

not sane

—memory

exhumed

**~**

i wake

the night

screaming

in this house:

a child

—myself—

beside me

get the poker

i say

from the fire

go!

(because i

know because

i know)

**~**

but she

—an aqualung

unplugged—

does not go

**~**

i wake

the night

screaming

in this house:

my mother

—a knife

on the stand—

and me

in the bed

by the wall

—a number

i should call

ii

i have mown

this lawn

& set sprinklers

out—sentinels

stepping off

each inch

this staccato stitch

—banal bliss

~

sun slants across

this clean cut

& satisfied

i sit—cold

concrete blessing

my skin

**~**

in the kitchen

—my mother

singing—

though hers

is not

a fresh wound

the hen

she fries

still bleeds

**~**

at the table:

sweet tea

white bread

crisp silence

**~**

is this

the night

my lungs

unplugged

her body hurled

her head

—a thud

**~**

& i awake

a witness

unwilling

iii

in the kitchen

by the door

to the den

blue cabinets

where you keep

whiskey

— decanted

in cut crystal

its lid—a ball

round & cool

in my small hand

**~**

before you

come in

my mother

and i

sometimes singing

sometimes silence

**~**

today she is tired

so i sit having tea

with dolls

(white

lace—worn

with time

tiny pearls

holding

fragile folds)

**~**

the back door

sucks open

what will it be

this time

**~**

blue cabinets

by the door

to the den

— reach in

swig the brew

take the sip

that changes

you

iv

november comes

a flush

of cadmium &

sky

this month

—you said

i do

the two of you

certain of love

~

november comes

this sun

—a low southern

slant

warming age

spotted skin

& i

am captive

of this

stiletto:

the night

you slammed

her head

(it was

something

she said)

and would not

stop the cabinets

—clapboard—

slapped blue

dark brown hair

—a wad

in your hand

~

november comes

this scene

—indelible:

a child's chair

(for tea with dolls)

split in half

flat

& i'm

at your feet

on my knees

please please

daddy please

v

you sit—slumped

elbows at right

angles your thick hands

in folds across your broad chest

sock-hatted

head nodding

these days you sleep

in this chair (the nights—

too long)

last night i paced

the floor all night

you say

all night

you say

again

as if my ears

could ease

your pain

i lean closer

_i'm sorry_ i whisper

weak words that break

in my mouth ( _i can't help you_

_i wish i could_ )

you don't give a shit about me

you say

and though i do i tell you i do

i do daddy i love you

you've snapped

& there is no

going back

Alia Neaton

### Cosmogony I

History tells us we

Climbed from the slime of

Phoenicia, dripping with

Disease and burning for

Change. In the cradle of

Civilization, deep

Ridges above our eyes,

We poured in what we

Could learn of the world,

Of how it was, we thought,

Thought of how it could be.

We couldn't be stopped

Until the Fertile Crescent bulged

With words written, with

The glitter of glass, the spin

Of a rough wheel. We

Began in the womb of the

World, where subspecies

Died until progress rose and

Stood on shaky legs and

Surveyed the land and the

Scope of the sea and then

Wondered about it all.

What we believe dies

In flame, rises. History

Repeats to the scourge of

Sons. As soon as man saw

Man, they started fighting.

Soft glow, microscopic

Scaffold, double

Helix—our computed

Code: programming

Madness. The sun burns as

It falls behind New Jersey.

An Eastern Seaboard awash

With anger and sweat and the

Sting of the sea. When we dig

Into our past, we discover

Secrets. When we find

Truth, we are changed.

When we change, we burn.

### Cosmogony II

In the lounge of the

Aurora House on

47th Street,

Commemoration

In art of those lost

To AIDS. A prayer

Wall of wounds, long gashes

Bleeding one into

The other. Each slip

Exposing someone

Else's precious memory.

A massive wall of

Wishes, a wall holding

Up hope and despair,

Cracked plaster beneath

Broken bows of remembrance,

Of a community unloading

Their heavy hearts so that,

One-by-one,

They may be lifted.

### Cosmogony III

Snow blotches

Spectral ground,

The stubborn,

Icy piles

Squatting still,

Reluctant

To let spring

In. A rat

Streaks across

The alley,

Over scraps

Of paper,

Glass, and the

Old tire-tread

Remains of

Another rat.

A woman

Stands, shadowed,

Inside her

Screen door. Smoke

Curls from her

Cigarette,

While the white

Cheshire moon

Smirks in the

Sky, trailed by

Two glowing

Planets—a

Kite tail of

Jupiter

And Venus,

Frozen ten,

Only ten,

Degrees a

Part in, a

Part of the

Celestial

Curtain that

Encloses

Us from the

Brittle chill

Of boundless,

Blackened

Horizon.

### Cosmogony IV

A world away from me,

My blood burns in the sand.

A city in shambles and a family of one

Stand still on a dusty morning.

The blue sky lays shrouded in grey

And the streets are silent and strange.

Since yesterday's dusk, the storm raged on.

Now the city doesn't know her face.

There was a display outside.

Did we feel safe behind walls?

Across our city, a fire blazed,

And structures crumbled and fell.

The glass balcony glowed red,

Refracted auburn streaks shimmered,

Distorted on the panes.

Deep garnet splashed the bedroom

Bathing us in shades of fire and blood.

### Cosmogony V

In what was a sunlit dining room,

The arc of time snaps.

As sure as I feel the smooth

Finish of wood table beneath

My hand, I know it is not

Real. A tangle of atoms

Held together by the mind

And what the mind conceives

As a table.

In what was a Tuesday afternoon,

Oak splinters and fades.

Raw matter bursts

Beneath my fingers—

Spectrum of color

And radiance, rays

Exploding outward,

Dissolving the impression

Of world around it. It is terrible and

Beautiful, the nature of this world.

The primal bay of anguish rises:

I cannot conceive a reality without him.

But then, I cannot conceive this reality at all.

Elisa Albo

### Each Day More

for Alexander Standiford

How do we negotiate

this one, the utter fragility

between here and gone,

the thinnest filament?

An eighteen-year-old,

your youngest, the baby

you carried, fed with

your mother fingers,

your father hands,

the boy you photographed

to capture and keep still,

present. How you fussed

and worried, driving him

to games, movies so many

lessons, to college, away,

into the world. How do we

carry on? How do we look

into your mother eyes, your

father face, the sibling hearts?

His life loomed large with yours,

buoyed by books art food drink,

by the laughter we gathered

each August of his life

to welcome new students

with the old. Then we entered

your home not in summer,

to a space suspended

between the ache of the gravel

driveway and the blades

of grass in the backyard,

the chill of the pool water

and the shade on the rooftop

patio, leaving us poised

with pain in air we're made

to breathe, untethered,

as if the gravity that holds

each child to the earth

has lost some of its force,

and there is too much sky,

each day more.

### Artie

Accountant. A startled bird, the word

escaped three times the next day,

flit from the radio, dropped out

of the mouth of a salesman, then

from a stranger in the street. I didn't

want to hear it. I didn't want to know

of numbers—bills, taxes. His age: 46.

Three, his children: 16, 12, 9. The date,

the last day of Passover, forever

marked in the Blackberry mind

like birthdays on or near deaths—

my sister's next to my grandmother's,

my daughter's on my cousins'—

or like the ages one holds one's breath

to pass over, those regular doves,

because my grandfather didn't and

my uncle didn't and my cousins

who flew suddenly, their skin still

smooth. I don't want to hear of numbers,

calculators, balances. A moth taps

on my bathroom window, trapped

when I closed it earlier. Debit, credit.

If I crank it open, I'll wake the sleeping.

If I don't, it will die, sooner. Too soon.

The last time I saw Artie was at our nephew's

bar mitzvah, November 17th. Thirteen.

Three times that weekend—Saturday

morning service, evening celebration,

Sunday brunch. He and I stood in

my brother's living room, spoke of his

daughter, 12. Her three black belts.

She played with my daughter, 5.

I don't want to know of numbers,

parties, food, though I made a cake

to take to his house, their house

minus one. To make the cake,

separate four eggs, measure a cup

of sugar, a half cup of cocoa, set the oven

temperature, the timer, for . . . . how long?

### Hurricane Sandy, 2012

Perhaps she dreams they are swimming,

propelled by waves that collected them

from her arms, small legs kicking to stay

afloat now that they've learned to swim

the waters of Staten Island. They are thrilled,

as children are when they learn to swim,

to read, to ride a bike. Holding hands,

the four-year-old protective of the two-year-old—

that's how she sees them when she wakes,

when she walks through the neatness

of emptiness and half expects to find

small forms on their big boy beds, blankets

kicked off, so that she'll enter quietly, navigate

toys strewn on the floor, cover their bodies.

She used to run her hand across the forehead

of one, the curly hair of the other, and smile,

thinking, They're beautiful when they sleep.

With their births, she became a light sleeper,

listening for a cry, a cough, for her name _._

At the grocery store, she reaches for cereal,

moves past apple juice boxes. Driving home,

she sees neighbors still cleaning up after

the storm, clearing debris, repairing homes.

For many, the lights have come back on.

Inside her house, she rests her head against

a window frame. Where are the small, bright

faces that so resemble hers? She waits for

a faint knock on the door, to open it, to find them

before her, a little taller, wet, so happy to see her.

The Pianist, Final Scene

Once again he sits at the piano in the Polish radio station,

the studio wood shiny and intact, no bombs exploding,

no plaster dust falling or young men diving for cover.

Once again he sits at the piano, tall and clean shaven,

healthy. The waterfalls and rustling leaves of Bach fly

from his fingers, filling the air with their light, the sound

engineer behind glass, smiling, rapt. Once again he is

playing this piano. When a friend he hasn't seen since before

the war enters, the pianist, still playing, looks over, smiles

a joyful greeting that, unlike the notes, fades, gradually

saddens to include the faces of his mother, his father,

a brother, two sisters who listened and laughed each day

as he played in their home, who perished in the camps

while he ran, hid, froze, starved nearly to death, and once

again plays on the radio and in concert halls for survivors.

### Terezin

1997

The camp sits empty now. Knots of tour groups peer

into dusty barracks, glance at communal toilets, over

stone walls rising from a dry moat that never defended

a thing or being. Along the paths between buildings,

gravel cracks, crunches. The noise wrecks the air,

my ears, the inner barracks of my heart each time I step

like stepping on bones, graves—who knows in this dust

what remains? Ushered into a low building we scurry

through a long, narrow passage and abruptly out to,

the guide informs, _the very spot where people were_

_shot._ I look down to my feet. I want to rise above

the ground, to not step anywhere. During the war,

did Red Cross workers who visited this _model_ camp

an hour east of Prague believe the Nazi propaganda

film, makeshift stores, soccer games and cheering

crowds were real? Stopping at a memorial that holds

a fistful of soil from other camps, Sara, a young woman

from New York, bends down for a stone to place on

the marble and in a parallel gesture, I bend with her,

as I've done at my grandmother's grave, to remember . . .

_yisgadal, v'yisgadash, sh' may rabo . . ._ the Kaddish

spills from my lips, first lines, all I recall of the Hebrew

prayer for the dead. I rush out of the compound—

past rows of bright white crosses, Stars of David,

bunches of red carnations like thousands of small

explosions or individual burning bushes in front

of each unnamed marker—into the parking lot

past food stands, tourists eating candy and rapidly

dissolving ice cream, cameras strung from their necks.

The floor in the Terezin Museum is carpeted, voices

hushed. Galleries split with partitions display pictures

and papers—an edict, a warning, several orders, plans,

charts, drawings, photographs, records, so many careful

records naming victims, giving them faces, people who

passed through trains to Belzec, Chelmo, Majdanek,

Sobibor, Treblinka, and _Osvetim_ , Czech for Auschwitz,

everything typed up, written down, catalogued, thoroughly

documented, as if someone someday would need to know

exactly to whom, precisely when, where, how many . . .

why? On a monitor in several galleries, an elderly woman

recounts her days in Terezin, her words close captioned

in English for the multitudes of tourists, many of whom sigh,

having had enough of death and despair for one day. But

the videotape is on a loop—she cannot stop telling her story.

Noah B. Salamon

### Sanctuary

Of an empty bed

small and cool and neat

of a pillow

I used to hide there

Of the swish of skin on cotton

of the ticking of the old clock

of the corner, all wall

Of the way the floor creaked

sudden pops, like some remote glacier

Of the shivering radiator pipes

beginning with the merest shake

Of a vibration, something so small

of a metallic whisper, miles below ground

Of tiles that glow white in the darkness

like ghostly lilies, floating

Of the bathtub, looming white

of the chipped wood desk

Of the dark, full of frights

and comfort

### Memorial

Something needs mending

something always does

Things wear and fray and

wear out

Things rustle and stir in

this ashy darkness, things

creak and moan and finally give

See, what I have left are

bits of conversation, glances and

moments left behind

like old letters

in a faded box

### New York Story

I came to New York once, for three months

to watch you die, slowly

in hospital beds, then in our apartment,

rented month by month, three months

past our wedding day

The stores had different names

but sold the same things–

the sympathy cards, like fallen leaves

the commerce of despair–

I tried to walk on the surface

like a Jesus bug

drowning if I fell

I let the days move by in splashes

I saw the contradictions

Still, I said only

we'll see, we'll see

### The Ark

The beasts are rollicking again:

The tigers have stolen a carcass

The alligators loll uncomfortably

on wide planks

and ache for mud.

To put it starkly:

The giraffes are cramped.

The best is just chaos

here in these floating days.

Two doves have returned–

one bearing branches–

But still they float.

"It's stopped raining, you know!"

"We should never have come!"

"Why did you bring us?"

Meanwhile below,

In the death-gray hull,

The man with the cottony beard,

The unruly eyes, the shock of gauzy hair,

Sits solemnly in his threadbare robe

And thinks about a promise he made.

### Where I Am From

Honeysuckle green leaves and

sun glinting through pine

Damp dirt and the smell of heat

rising off pavement like

the whisper of ocean through a shell

A memory of rain-slick streets

black mirrors of neon and steam

the faint electric pulse

Of wooden decks in the fading sun

black and white baseball and

the rising whine of crickets as evening comes

Of pale beer in parking lots

where crabgrass grew through cracked asphalt

One night, when I was just a boy,

we drove and drove

until silent through summer darkness

moths like stars whizzing by

back of the station wagon, roomy and warm

Nobody else around

I rolled down the window and breathed in

The distant smell of sea

Contributor Notes

 Elisa Albo's chapbook, Passage to America, is now available as an e-book. Born in Havana and raised in central Florida, her poems have appeared in Alimentum, Bomb, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Stream Magazine, InterLitQ, Irrepressible Appetites, The Potomac Journal, Tigertail: A South Florida Annual. She recently completed To Sweeten the Flesh, a collection of food poems, and teaches English and ESL at Broward College. She lives with her husband and daughters in Ft. Lauderdale, FL.

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

 Suzanne Burns likes to write about kumquats. Poems from this Sixfold contest round will soon appear as part of a chapbook from Finishing Line Press called The Portland Poems. She is currently working on a short story collection called Love and Other Monsters, a follow-up to her debut short story, "Misfits and Other Heroes." She has tattoos of lines from J.D. Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction on both forearms.

 Jeff Burt lives in Santa Cruz County, California, and works in manufacturing. He has work in Rhino, Red River Review, New Verse News, Barnwood, Verse Wisconsin, and The Write Room.

 Benjamin Dombroski is a graduate of the MFA program at Virginia Commonwealth University. His work has appeared in Best New Poets 2009 and Hunger Mountain.

 William Doreski lives in Peterborough, New Hampshire. His latest book is City of Palms (AA Press, 2012). He has published three critical studies, including Robert Lowell's Shifting Colors. His fiction, essays, poetry, and reviews have appeared in many journals. He won the 2010 Aesthetica poetry award.

 Christopher Dulaney graduated with BA in English with a Creative Writing concentration from Georgia College & State University in May 2013. A multiracial writer, he writes prose and poetry and has studied under Allen Gee, Laura Newbern, Judson Mitcham, and Marty Lammon. He currently lives in Savannah, GA.

 R. G. Evans's poems, fiction and reviews have appeared in publications such as Rattle, The Literary Review, Paterson Literary Review, and Weird Tales. His original music, including the song "The Crows of Paterson," was featured in the 2012 documentary film All That Lies Between Us, about the life and work of poet Maria Mazziotti Gillan. Evans teaches high school and university English and Creative Writing in southern New Jersey.

 Josh Flaccavento holds a BA in Writing, Literature, and Publishing from Emerson College and an MA in Literature from Clark University. He is from northeast Tennessee by way of southwest Virginia, but his poems in Sixfold are about the West, where he spent some time working on farms. He enjoys referring to himself in the third person, Norse mythology, and martial arts.

 Joe Freeman, raised in western Pennsylvania, contracted there an abiding love of forests and fields. Graduating from Harvard, he attended the School of Peace Studies in Bradford, England (more hills and fields), and returned to the states—after a stint of community work in Northern Ireland—to undertake a career, of sorts, in government service. He presently resides in Arizona, a full-time homemaker. His only previously published poem, "What Job Might Have Said," appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Midstream.

 Toni Hanner's poems appear in Yellow Medicine Review, Alehouse, Calyx, Gargoyle, and others. She is a member of Eugene's Red Sofa Poets and Port Townsend's Madrona Writers. She had two books published in 2012: The Ravelling Braid from Tebot Bach, and a chapbook of surrealist poems, Gertrude Poems and Other Objects from Traprock Books. Gertrude was selected by Mary Jo Bang as a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award.

 Chris Haug teaches writing and literature somewhere in Middle America. His work has appeared in Scissors and Spackle and Punchnel's. He holds degrees from Central College and the University of Northern Iowa and is currently enrolled in Pacific University's MFA program.

 Clifford Hill has recently retired from Columbia University where he held an endowed chair at Teachers College, the Arthur I. Gates Professor of Language and Education. He also directed the Program in African Languages at the Institute of African Studies in the School of International and Public Affairs where he taught the Hausa language. During his retirement he continues to conduct research on cultural variation in the ways in which language represents space and time.

 Emily Hyland lives and writes in Brooklyn, New York. Presently, she is a yoga instructor, but before this career shift, she was a high school English teacher in some of the city's most high-needs schools; a lot of her recent poetry is inspired by that experience. She has published poems in the Brooklyn Review, The Awakenings Review, and Stretching Panties and is working to publish her collection of poetry about the reality of teaching in NYC.

 Chris Joyner is a recent graduate of the MFA program at the University of Miami and calls Virginia home. In 2012 he won honorable mention in Winning Writers' Sports Poetry and Prose Contest and in 2011 received the Alfred Boas Poetry Prize. His work has appeared in B O D Y, Penduline Press, Brusque, Fiddleblack, the Barely South Review, and elsewhere. While he is currently an adjunct professor of English by day and a server by night, in a parallel universe he ghostwrites for a well-respected rapper.

 David Kann escaped academic administration and returned to poetry and just-teaching. In the process he discovered that writing poetry makes him feel more like himself than most activities. In pursuit of himself and better poetry he recently completed an MFA at Vermont College of Fine Arts. He has been published in Stoneboat and The Sierra Nevada Review, among other journals.

 Peter Kent lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts. He has published work in Cimarron Review and the online journal ForPoetry.

 Ryan Kerr is a teacher, writer, and musician living in central Illinois. He is currently pursuing his EdD in Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His poems have appeared in Poetry Motel and Matter.

 Alex Linden hails from Tempe, Arizona. She holds an MFA from Oklahoma State University and is currently a PhD student at Texas Tech University. Other poems have appeared in Blue Earth Review, Blood Lotus, Juked, and Burner magazine. She has poems forthcoming in Bayou Magazine.

 Huso Liszt's poems have also appeared in Poetry East, Poetry Northwest, River City, The Indiana Review, The American Anthropologist, and the Journal for Anthropology & Humanities. He has written extensively about the Peoples of the Agreste in Brasil. Also a theatre artist, he is a seventeen-year resident of Ketchikan, Alaska, where he is currently working on a novel for children.

 George Longenecker teaches history, poetry, and technical writing in the Department of English, Humanities and Social Sciences at Vermont Technical College. His recent poems have appeared in Memoir, Atlanta Review, and Santa Fe Review. He lives in Middlesex, Vermont, with his wife and poetry muse, Cynthia Martin. When he's not writing and teaching, he hikes and skis in the Green Mountains.

 Abraham Moore is a poet originally from central Indiana. He currently lives and works in San Diego.

 Award-winning poet G. L. Morrison writes, teaches, and nests in Portland, Oregon. Her writing has migrated into Sinister Wisdom, Evergreen Chronicles, Girlburn, The Advocate, Manzanita Quarterly, Alternet, Sexis, and into anthologies including Best of Best Women's Erotica (Cleis Press), Mom: Candid Memoirs (Alyson Books), and How Can You Say We're Not Related (Scurfpea Publishing). Her poetry collection Chiaroscuro Kisses (Headmistress Press) will be released later this year.

 Alia Neaton is a writer and editor who received an MA in writing and publishing from DePaul University in 2013 and is thrilled to have her poems debut in Sixfold. She is currently working on her first full-length manuscript, an exploration of modern society's dynamic relationship with food. She lives in Chicago with her husband; they are expecting their first child in February. www.alianeaton.com

 Patricia Percival lives in Atlanta, where she is an active member of the writing community. When not making poems, she thinks about the big picture while micromanaging her garden (weeding). Her most recent publication is in The Southern Poetry Anthology, Volume 5: Georgia. She is currently shopping a chapbook, Bargain with the Speed of Light, in which two of the poems in this issue of Sixfold will appear.

 D. Ellis Phelps, painter & poet-novelist, is the author of Making Room for George (Balboa Press, 2013). To engage more of her work visit www.dellisphelps.com or find her on Facebook at www.facebook.com/DEllisPhelpsArtist

 Marc Pietrzykowski lives in Lockport, NY, with his wife Ashley, and enjoys being alive more than should be legal. He has published five books of poetry and one novel, as well as numerous individual poems, stories, and essays in a variety of places. He also writes music, sings, and plays a few instruments. More details on all these pursuits can be found on his web page, www.marcpski.com

 Sam Pittman lives in Pittsburgh, PA, where he writes poetry and teaches composition, writing, and ESL. He has received awards from the Academy of American Poets and fellowships from the American-Scandinavian Foundation and the Sperry Fund. He holds an MFA in Poetry from the University of Pittsburgh and a BA from the University of California-Berkeley. Sam's poems have also appeared in ditch,.

 Tori Jane Quante recently graduated from Georgia College & State University with a BA in English, Biology minor, and a headache. While attending Georgia College, she was the poetry editor and editor-in-chief of The Peacock's Feet, an undergraduate-run literary journal. In addition to writing, she enjoys yoga, baking, and fretting over global warming.

 Ricky Ray was educated at Columbia University. In 2013, he was the winner of Fugue's annual poetry contest, and the second-prize winner of the Whisper River poetry contest. Recent work of his can be found in Esque Mag, Ink Sweat & Tears, and the "literary mixtape" Chorus, edited by Saul Williams. He lives in New York with his wife and three cats, where they dream of farm life in an undiscovered village.

 Carey Russell graduated with honors from the University of Virginia with degrees in English Literature and Mathematics. She moved to New York after graduation to work in Environmental Engineering at Columbia University. She now works as a writer and researcher at Columbia's Office of Alumni and Development and is currently pursuing an MFA at Columbia. Her work has most recently appeared in American Athenaeum, the Cumberland River Review, and Vex Literary Journal.

 Noah B. Salamon spent most of his childhood in Maryland. He majored in philosophy at Swarthmore College and is pursuing an MA in English at Loyola Marymount University. He currently teaches English in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife and three sons.

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

 Christine Stroud is originally from eastern North Carolina, but currently lives in Pittsburgh with her partner and three cats. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Chatham University and works as an Assistant Editor for Autumn House Press.

 Bobby Taylor is an MFA candidate in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied poetics at Naropa University. An award-winning and Grammy-nominated songwriter, he has had songs recorded by Don Williams, Montgomery/Gentry, Billy Ray Cyrus, and many other Nashville recording artists. As an actor he has performed on many stages throughout the country including The Lamb's Theater in NYC, the Ryman Auditorium, the Grand Ole Opry, and his hometown theater: The Cumberland County Playhouse in Crossville, Tennessee.

 Jonathan Travelstead received his MFA at Southern Illinois University. He served in the Air Force National Guard for six years as a firefighter and currently works as a full-time firefighter for the city of Murphysboro. When not on duty, he backpacks twice each year in Central America and Europe, and works on an old dirt bike he hopes will get him to Peru in December.

 Jennifer Lowers Warren has published poetry in Rhino, Nerve Cowboy, and Literary Mama. She lives near a military base somewhere in the world for the next ten years.
