POETRY
- about the Guest Poetry Editor
Editor Michael Ryan is the author of three volumes of poetry; an autobiography, Secret Life; and a collection of essays about poetry and writing, A Difficult Grace. In Spring, 2004, his memoir, Baby B, will be published by Graywolf Press and his New and Selected Poems will be published by Houghton Mifflin. Among the many distinctions for his work are the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a Whiting Writers Award, National Endowment for the Arts and Guggenheim Fellowships, and the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of California, Irvine.
ANNA’S HUMMINGBIRD by Tom Babayan
His flight describes an arc that,
after rising above the chaparral,
plummets to crack air off the tailfeathers.
When he rises again, this time
closer to her, he keeps his small body
still and hangs on air accelerated
by the wings’ constant figure eight –
an ancient sequence scripted before
attraction and repulsion split at the root.
Spring: a short while before what takes
the appearance of love gives way
to the empty perch on which his bright chin
flashed its double message: come close,
stay back. And mornings filled
with what we call song,
that melodious extract of fear,
whose absence in the shorter days to come
sounds almost like relief.
ECLIPSE by Tom Babyan
i.
. . . just as the battle was growing warm, day was on a
sudden changed into night . . . The Medes and Lydians,
when they observed the change, ceased fighting, and
were alike anxious to have terms of peace agreed upon.
– Herodotus
It was darkness that slayed us first;
quicker than night, it spared no one.
Then, stillness, blade-sharp and as swift,
swallowed our bloodlust until
everyone backed off. When the stars appeared,
some ran, some dropped their weapons
where they stood, others knelt and prayed.
Through the shadows I glimpsed the enemy
on the opposite hill, their outlines blurring
into the dark curtain raised behind them.
They had become like us:
warriors regressed to children,
contrite under the stabbed eye of god.
ii.
We know by God’s design the precision
of His making and can predict our passage
into shadows. But when the black disk
passed through you like disease, we wondered:
could you be that much like us? one among
billions and, as it turns out, not unique
at all, surrounded too by the unresponsive
dark you pour yourself into one atom
at a time. When the moon fit like a lid
on a jar, a halo spilled from your edges,
the body beyond circumference.
Translucent, pearl-white, your greater glory
seen only through brief death, as if God
meant to reveal to man the soul of man.
iii.
I have a life too. You know only
a bright surface, fraction of the whole.
I am dark at the core, and quiet. Like you
I have thought: was I made simply to light
this small corner of the universe?
My radiance speeds in all directions
and burned long before your attempts to
explore places in me you could never visit.
Perhaps it was inevitable. You make
from my resources so many persistent things,
you think of me as yours. So much that when
I am shadowed for the briefest moment
you want to scatter, believing that hidden
darkness in you, too, has been discovered.
Tom Babayan worked for six years as a field biologist in desert and wetland habitats of the West. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Many Mountains Moving, Blue Mesa Review, and South Dakota Review.
Provo Canyon, 1951 by Ruth Anderson Barnett
I’m handing him a beer,
lighting his cigarettes, the burnt coal
floating between us through the dark.
In the back seat my mother
can sleep because I do this.
He’s cutting the curves, wheels straddling lanes,
I’m pulling against the car, willing it
back across the line.
I can’t understand how a woman
so on guard against catastrophe
could marry a man so bent on it.
Between them, I’m learning how to drive.
Ruth Anderson Barnett has published a chapbook, The Stripper in the Mojave, and poems in Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Virginia Quarterly Review, and other magazines and anthologies.
HE TAPS THE CAGE AGAIN by Allison Benis
More applause, more doves, and so on,
until the cage is, in some sense,
complete. In the spot-light, the cage collapses.
As the doves fly out above the audience,
a woman says it’s like snow. Although
it’s not snow, and the doves are warm and
trained to return. It doesn’t matter. Applause.
It does. Our hands want to repeat emptiness.
* * *
You appear. Inside, twelve white bodies
shake with light – a click before release. The cage
collapses, and you fly through the thick
sound of hands, up under the glass chandelier.
Tonight, sound stands as you fly over –
as the other white wings brush against the low
black ceiling. Don’t think it’s a kind of love.
The way their bodies circle back is a secret
you’re trained not to remember.
* * *
Who was made to be filled? Each time he
touches me, I feel the shudder of four wings, three-
hundred clapping hands. Only now, in the heat
of the spot-light, filled with white bodies,
do I understand what it must be like to have one
constant body. I cannot sleep. A latch is flipped and
I collapse – a rush of cool air as each dove
lifts and scatters. Then a steady crash. Yes – for what I am:
empty. Their hands touch and come apart.
KITE SONNET by Allison Benis
And the wooden handle unravels white
string between her hands, loss is visible:
it grows smaller, a red diamond, and up
higher. If the dead sing, their voices are
constant. A red diamond swaying. I am
making her head tilt back again to look
at the sky: heaven, string – it is one way
of being connected to the first thing . . .
she wants to be with, near him. Dying is
how the dead sing. And the electric wire,
tangled slowly with string, cannot stop its
initial pull – like a hooked blood fish, but
skyward – until she is not alive or almost
dead, but neither, and therefore closer.
THE MAGICIAN’S BOX by Allison Benis
His saw glitters with resurrection. And
the metal lid latch. Her smile. Why are you
afraid even when you know the ending?
Torture. Repletion. Her marvelous head,
hands, and feet slide through holes in a black
box. Because she is not afraid, you must be
afraid for her – the way swimmers practice
dives in their minds. Jackknife. Underwater.
The body doesn’t know the difference. God
or his fingers. The diving body received by
fire. He forces down. And as it reaches her,
each climax becomes more difficult – blood-
less, metal long and dreamed – until the box
splits open, see: to be broken is to be alive.
HORSE WITH LOWERED HEAD by Allison Benis
To place your fingers on her back is natural. To draw your fingers down her neck into her mouth. Which is gasping once. Because you can hold the sculpture in one hand completely. The tip of my thumb could fit inside the roof of her mouth. A smooth cool gasp, like ice to the teething. How careful we must be that she does not choke. That our thumb does not determine if her head is hollow. God would make a sound like weeping in caves. Or the wooden handles on the neck of a rocking horse when they are first touched. It was best to oscillate back and forth until you tipped over slowly. The sway, for instance, of a long cornsilk mane. Which was not real. As in the thumb which replaces the nipple when the self becomes a circle. As in the mouth of a horse in the shape of a thimble. I could place my thumb inside my mouth to end the sound. But God is endless. Like fingers curling over inconsolable stones. Or a hand, finally, closing around the neck of a horse. Because I cannot hurt her enough to grow old. Surely we have tipped over by now.
Allison Benis has poems published or forthcoming in The Threepenny Review, Indiana Review, Quarterly West, and Prairie Schooner.
from IF I TAKE YOU HERE, a poem sequence by Martha Carlson-Bradley
* * *
He never even owned the house.
And then they tore it down.
Space in air: their bedrooms once.
Column of nothing:
the staircase that carried them up.
* * *
Dead of winter for the dead.
In the barn, unoccupied,
weak light seeps over the floor,
the bits of faded straw.
Porcelain eggs that fooled the hens
grow deeply cold.
On the workbench
a heavy magnifying glass
has frosted over.
* * *
For the beat of a pulse
lightning reveals
grass and apple tree, each leaf
separate, still.
It flits into the hayloft,
gleams on feathers of swallows
asleep:
the pair who chattered at dusk,
who cut wide arcs through the sky.
Martha Carlson-Bradley has published poems in New England Review, Beloit Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, Marlboro Review, Poetry East, and other magazines. Her chapbook, Nest Full of Cries, was published by Adastra Press.
AFTER YOUR DEATH by Douglas Brayfield
From the plank bridge above the waterfall
I didn’t wish to see
couples wading knee-
deep in shallows or trading giggly small
talk as they clamored up the bank,
or, closer to me,
such fearful symmetry
in reddish-brown deer flank
disturbing the brush beside the trail.
I’d hoped to watch secretly
swirls of memory
spilling over rock below the handrail
before purling down the spring-fed brook
into the Ohio, the Mississippi
and, eventually, the sea . . .
instead, at the end of the path we once took,
here again only
water eddies and drops,
not you floating with me
where memory stops.
TRES GATOS by Douglas Brayfield
Days before Christmas, the rains over,
they pawed their way into the fenced yard;
black with brown-orange blotches, triplets
impossible to tell apart
were it not for their colored
collars: pink, yellow, blue.
Abandoned. And so they stayed
put, each evening staring through
the bottom panes of the kitchen’s French door.
Feed them, and they would never leave.
Hungrier and hungrier they grew
until Maria, the housekeeper,
took pity and slipped them
scraps of turkey dog and chicken leg,
the children’s leftovers.
By the second week, as the rains
began again, Friskies giblets
were set out at breakfast and dinner.
One afternoon, near the end of January,
they lay casually sprawled
on the chaise lounges nearest
the hot tub, soaking up the first
rays of the new year, as if they’d
lived here always: carefree, sybaritic
teenagers taking a few hours off
from a grunge band rehearsal.
Homelessness, hunger were someone else’s
fate now, whoever’s on the other
side of the backyard fence picking
stale bagels out of trash bins.
No clang, no clatter. The soft
thud of rubber lids being dropped.
LAST STANZA by Douglas Brayfield
Late
afternoon, August.
He steps outside
a house he has no memory of
and gazes at the green,
sun-glazed lawn.
Whatever was lost
there, remains lost.
Sunlight slides
down the western
faces of the trees,
laying long black paths
over the still radiant grass.
SLEEPWALKER by Douglas Brayfield
The mother dove
nesting in the trumpet vine
blinks at each movement
behind the French doors.
The coo, coo of her mate
has roused the sleepwalker again.
Guarding her eggs,
she inhabits a world
with no metaphors for death
only death itself.
Trailing shadow behind him,
the sleepwalker lunges
towards the full-throated
cooing of the male.
In him,
a deep mourning
struggling to awaken.
Douglas Brayfield is a psychotherapist in private practice in Los Angeles.
INDICATION by Laton Carter
The winter light balances with the light inside houses,
for a moment steadies, then breaks, dies again.
On my walk, people are in their kitchens.
From another room, the cold blue light of the television
flickers wildly against a woman’s cheeks, her forehead.
In my mind I hear your ecstatic
postured voice. The praise you heaped this summer
on blackberries, the rolling beauty of words you couldn’t
not say twice.
Life is not boundless.
As much as I loved your loving of things, I knew
we would go back. I would be the same.
In the calm regularity of streets and seconds, the space I make for worry.
Laton Carter’s work has appeared in Ploughshares, Chicago Review, and Notre Dame Review. His first book will be published by the University of Chicago Press.
IN PRAISE OF MY FILET MIGNON by Gary Clark
Part the patio where it was cooked,
part the vast, forever vanishing Wyoming
where it was branded and raised,
it arrives in a thin pool of its own blood,
sweet and sizzling, two inches of pure
American muscle fed and slaughtered just for me.
I set it down before me and inhale.
On its glistening, perfectly-seared surface
the appetizing scars of charcoal fire are genuine.
As I learned to do, I test for tenderness.
I press it with the flat of my fork
until it steams and bleeds a delicate maroon,
a thin grease beading up like sweat. It is rare.
I salt it lightly, with my knife I apply
a gentle pressure and it yields immediately,
unable to conceal the soft, humid mammal of its interior.
My tongue and gums awash in fresh saliva,
I prepare my first bite and lift it
to my mouth, which opens automatically.
I am now as alone as I will ever be.
As I chew the work I do excites me more than anything
that rite requires, my molars come together in a rabid rush
part blood, part hunger, part serenity so deep
it runs through me like a religion,
like the boy in the attic and the headstone
in the rain and the history of which I am a fraction,
a joy so purely private and complete
let an entire cottonwood come crashing down,
let the tractor deliver its driver to another world,
let the sadness be so real it hurts
even in the midnight where the men skate,
through a blue moonlight, on a pond.
Let my happiness be unable to defend itself
and still I will resist the places
I might go, my mind a home for flies
and ladybugs, the world relieved of intellect,
a breeze of bright salt air sweeping up and over me
with each stroke of the guide’s pole,
an elderly Eleutheran easing me and my father
forward through an expanse of flats
and mangroves the bonefish inhabited like absences.
It’s amazing what a good filet can do!
After all the places I’ve walked into
wanting nowhere else, it was the Johnson Pharmacy
where for a moment, just yesterday,
no wayward bird fluttering frantically
among the aspirin and laxatives,
no brick through the window, nothing in fact happening
at all except that keen fluorescent tranquility
in which everything is half alive –
for a moment nowhere else was actually possible.
I stopped and considered postcards.
Like a man who knows his heaven is inevitable
I live with the delicious comfort of steak
and the family it preserves me in.
It is the calm I carry forward into regions
to which I will never care, nor be asked, to belong.
It is, as they say, my home away
from home, my home concealed by a mountain
three times the height I have become
and the river which like a northern light
comes down to kiss me, audibly.
As I chew I challenge anyone I know
to diminish me, me and all the ways I eat
my steak, to find another way to lift me toward
the sky and ensconce me there.
What a picnic, what a meal, what a sky,
I say, leaning back so completely satisfied,
what a beautiful piece of meat.
POEM FOR AFTER PETER DIES by Gary Clark
He was my love, was my story
about how beautiful the bridges were,
the half of me that hung down from the moon.
He was the city moon in me,
the Connecticut you couldn’t touch
in me, the reason I could be whatever
it is I am, so deep in me.
The sleet, the cars, the duty which was ours,
he was the ice beneath my blades
and the truth about happiness I overcame,
my trembling on the verge of noise.
In him as if in nothing else
I discovered a sheltering silence
from which all confusions can be distanced,
discovered a cold and mountain mile
which like our heirloom rifle
I polished, knowing we would need it,
if not now then the day winter refuses to deliver
its beauty and we lie cold,
very separately cold, we take our places
around the perfect pizza and inhale
the anchovy-sausage we adore,
without warning the north returning to its place in me
and he, not knowing how to find me there,
stepping out into the street
where he lights a cigarette and stands
in the wind of my being gone,
the smoke by which he lives lifting
me and him and us and everything we are
away, and like air we go.
FLIGHT OF THE BIRDFISH by Gary Clark
Sleep where the water wakes you
and your eyes will fill with fish.
Deep down where the water takes you
you will roll, your belly will brush
the smooth stones buried there
and long ago, when water was king.
When water was king you wake
and roll deep where the birdfish flash
disappearing, half-asleep you go with them
alone, and like it used to be.
That’s where the voices originate.
Sleep where the water breaks you
and you won’t ever rearrange.
Steep where the water breaks through
it’s you and nothing but yourself
colliding with the softly-colored stones.
Weep where the water makes you
and your memories are gone,
the birdfish are not fish but what fish wish
they were – something more like you
who flies but has no place to go,
not anymore, now that the water sweeps
you sleeping from another hill.
To want to be near is enough to ask,
and now you have your answer:
fall asleep where the water wakes you
and your eyes will fill with fish –
birdfish, the kinds native to the world
water breaks, and brings you.
Gary Clark is Director of Development for the Vermont Studio Center, a community of visual artists and writers in Johnson, Vermont.
THE WISH by Don Colburn
for El
As heartache can go, ours wasn’t much –
one yes we wanted more than we knew.
Now we’ve carried that silent longing
into the woods, switchbacking slow
across the shadows of hemlocks,
away from the shushing, silt-green North Fork
and up through the blowdown to these open meadows.
Does anyone believe all that happens
happens for the best? I know this:
A wish is never wrong.
A yellow monkeyflower has bloomed
among the mossy rocks by a runnel of snowmelt
and makes me glad – the extravagance,
how little depends on it.
TOUCHSTONES by Don Colburn
Cold and glossy with seawater,
they tarnish quickly in my hand
so I fling them back under the waves.
Would the world sing if I let it be
and listened? If, wandering a new shore,
memory fell behind and I heard nothing
but this accumulating commonplace
of song? Though surely the wind
would have its say, whose roughening touch
the sunken stones will not be troubled by.
Don Colburn is a reporter for The Portland Oregonian. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Prairie Schooner.
ETHEREAL SKIRT by Sue Cronmiller
Fully-lined. Organdy over silk.
Smoke. Dipped in smoke.
She’d have preferred beige. It was
her color.
Melancholic dementia –
a state through which my mother had become this
imperturbable wise person
lying quietly most of the time
and when we spoke, she spoke
in deliberate sentences. Since the illness,
or whatever it was that held her
we’d found a place, she and I,
to have a glass of wine.
I’ve read about it but never felt
the feelings they were talking about . . .
(She and I)
There had always been a good feeling
with your father but never . . .
Much like watching a movie as a child
where the dialogue is entirely lost on you
and you laugh to make it look like you understand
(laughing when an older brother laughs)
finding the cues completely unnecessary
when all alone with the photographs,
shoved in your father’s sock drawer,
of a nude brunette on a fifties motorcycle –
the full beauty of her could not escape
the girl you were
not once – (not ever)
MY DAUGHTER’S SADNESS, A CAUSAL ANALYSIS by Sue Cronmiller
There were things I gave her
I had to take back. Of course,
my body was the first thing.
Soon after, the breast.
To compensate, at night,
warm milk in a plastic bottle.
Even this would prove a mistake.
Bad for the teeth. Nothing then but
cool water. Every night a book.
For three years, she had me,
more or less, to herself. Then,
the second child came. This one
a happy child.
And so, like this, her losses pile up.
The father that took her fishing and riding horses
has a new wife and son. The house
we lived in with the swing set
sold. These days it’s the little things
she looks for but can’t put her hands on,
dishes dropped or anything
I might forget at the store.
The more we talk the more
carefully she listens, careful
to squeeze a little more meaning out of
everything I say.
ON THE MEND by Sue Cronmiller
Not because I’ve flunked
looking tough, not because
you stopped to talk while I was
hauling out the garbage or
peckishly checking the mailbox
but because tonight I saw my little girl
strapped to the operating table
and heard the calm
performance of her mother’s voice,
because you said the nightbird’s
piercing little flutes
remind you of us and because
every night I hear them,
because a part of me
is terrified she won’t wake up.
It’s time to touch the mark
above the bone where my stubborn children were born
unblemished; because it’s an important, fleshy scar;
because it’s time I see where I was
opened, time to see
that staggering incision
now overgrown with curls.
Sue Cronmiller currently serves as program director and managing editor for Humanities Out There, an outreach program to disadvantaged schools in Orange County, California.
IT WAS MY FAVORITE THINGS THAT HE PLAYED by Chris Davidson
The waves on this shore are not waves.
This is the Atlantic, as blue as the maps
and with swans – swans on the ocean! –
slowly treading sunlight on water.
I have not seen this before,
not only an ocean with swans
but the way light comes down here –
is this how it should be or never can be
for long? We watch from a train –
we’re headed to the airport,
then home. I don’t always love you like this.
For example, earlier this week
the people swayed like seaweed
while the subway cars floated and bobbed
(I glimpsed them through the window). Or,
on the way to the A train, the notes rose and rolled
down corridors in sweet echoes;
it was a picture coming into focus:
a clarinet played
and the player leaned against a wall –
one leg straight down, one leg bent,
head bowed in shame or prayer.
PREGNANT WOMAN by Chris Davidson
There should be a word
for the pregnant woman –
a single, luminous word –
when she rises from the couch,
rises with shoulders back and the rounded weight out;
above her, before her it rises. (For once
it is not weight: it is a warm balloon.
Life is not floating, I will tell the child,
but questions lead to flight.)
She walks towards me sitting
at the table, where the lamp shines
off my glasses, the forehead below
my widow’s peak, and her belly,
nudging my shoulder. With the back
of my hand I gauge its temperature,
like I do with the windshield
when I drive.
CAME HOME by Chris Davidson
with a child on my chest,
walking from the car to the front door,
shielding him from the sun,
his mother trailing behind. Inside,
I turned on the Beach Boys
& went to the bedroom.
My wife sorted three days’ worth
of congratulations while I lay on the bed,
my new son on my chest
breathing inaudibly. From the living room,
“When I Grow Up to Be a Man” played
while, through windows
at the foot of the bed, a breeze,
color into color, slipped past the blinds
& over my bare feet, bare legs,
over the back of my child & the back
of my hands holding him to me,
me not having slept in 53 hours,
now waiting for the world outside
to lead me into a chamber of dreams,
the colored wind my blanket home.
IN THE HAIRCUT PLACE by Chris Davidson
I’d like to shine
of my own volition,
scatter my light like gravel
on wet asphalt, like lights
in mist. I want to make
small statements.
I will swim for you.
I will see that the water is black
and your light is shining on me
drowning. If you want me too.
I’m sitting in a haircut chair
and the sky gets dark outside.
The water is still and your water
is light. You are a light, Oh Lord
you are the light, and I make no apology
for you now – I’m all hollow.
I’m greasy hair and greasy back.
My shirt it sticks to my back.
The haircut place is almost empty
and the rain is coming down.
YOU by Chris Davidson
Sing flower, sing until dogs
tilt their heads at you, as on
television; sing for the bees who buzz
for you, who keep you fresh
until I find you and choose you
to grace the hair of this woman here I am with.
In your dying you will make her more beautiful
than she is, you will augment the day,
and help to keep us preserved. Darling,
do you remember when you burst through – late at night –
my apartment door? There never was such promise
as in the question should we go see
if someplace is open? Possibilities
have since been limited. What I mean to say
is, I understood why you wanted a dog –
why the idea charmed you – the day I found you
naked, before the mirror, crying.
When I chose you, the dying began,
and for a brief time I was something to see.
Come, let’s put the television in the trunk,
let’s drive it to the Salvation Army,
and let us choose each other again.
And tomorrow.
Chris Davidson plays guitar with the rock band the Santiago Steps.
UNDERTAKING by Sue Davis
She had to wash away
the black silt
worked into his pores, into
the wrinkles around his eyes
that made him look older
than his 47 years.
She walked his naked length
on the table at her waist
where she kneaded dough,
where she told the men to place him.
She had given them the children,
and made them all leave.
She took her time.
By lantern light, she washed each finger,
cleaning underneath the nail with
a splinter sheathed in cotton.
She started once to wrap him
in a blanket. He was so cold.
She found a mole on his hip
she never knew was there.
I thought he would have liked
to have her find the mole like this
when he was still alive.
I said to you
when the husband died,
The way it’s done now,
they make her leave the room,
leave the body with a stranger
who zips it up in a plastic bag,
tags it like a specimen,
puts this warm sweet body
in a drawer.
They let a stranger handle you
that one last time.
They would have to drug me.
They would have to drag me away.
Remember how I told you that?
Susan Davis lives and teaches in Long Beach, California.
REDRESS by John Donoghue
Something happened – something spilled from that dream
into the room,
and then a large, terrible insect
stung me on the face.
Had I injured her? Did I break something of hers
she loved?
Tearful, guilty – I remember walking
to where she was sleeping – but oh,
it was horrible, the buzzing,
the large, black body with wings.
I didn’t
defend myself – stung on the face
I told no one.
And what do I expect now, at sixty –
clarity? Ease? A body
free from scars?
Her room’s gauzy light had always been
a comfort, its white lace curtains
lifting in a breeze –
she woke when I entered,
sat up, flushed, and showed me herself.
It had been a dream – she showed me herself
uninjured.
Have I been happy? Sure, I’ve been happy,
but afraid: that insect
is still here in the world – and this
I’m certain of: it sought-me-out,
it knew who I was.
John Donoghue teaches electrical and computer engineering at Cleveland State University. His poetry has appeared in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, Willow Springs, The Lancet, and his book, Precipice, was published in 2000 by Four Way Books.
LISTENER’S GUIDE (CHOPIN) by Mark Dow
So sad and unbearably sad these nocturnes, listen,
Beneath the glimmering of hope ballooning
Into a march now, puffed-up nationalist fluff
Bouncing precariously against a sad sad current beneath,
The current resumes its far truer tale now,
A gentle cascadence flubbles across sentimental’s throbs,
The sadder true current buoys that and then resurfaces
Insistently whispering its passive meandering unfathomable way.
* * *
Urgent tickles flutter the dark surface
But windlessly, to a bend of sparely shaded nuance,
Nuance of adoring, of forgiveness, of pause and,
Unanswered, resuming, and pause and climbs a higher resistance, an acceptance,
An opening flatness of settling, of settling all,
Watersky flatupon marshlike meadow now, dark now,
New until, one imagines, first light again comes,
Until unbearable forgiveness bears the sadness across and withdraws.
* * *
Sadly skimming surface then tenderly insistent,
Plumbing staggered depths to mourn the irretrievable
What, to revive a continuity, a countenance of calm,
Calm true, true calm, pomp dreams reclothed in elegant determination,
Strolling now in wistfulness, one careful step at a time,
Resurgence and trembling strung together as memory
Of a previous hope unrealized, and fades again
Farther this time away fading farther this time and this time away.
Mark Dow’s work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Boston Review, Chicago Review, Faultline, and Conjunctions.
SOLFEGGIO by Ellen Dudley
You can solfege the foghorns here and the fog
is so thick it passes through an outstretched hand.
Just now a trawler chugged close to shore, the red buoy
somewhere off her port bow, through the channel
you could swim across if the water was more
than fifty two degrees, and it isn’t. The horns
are distorted in this fog and you can’t tell which
is which but they moan pitch perfect and you
could score them to the tides, surf keeping
four four time. And now and then the grace
notes of the gulls intrude.
Beauty? The trawlers haul the bundled tourists
out to see the whales to make the payments
on the boat now that the banks are fished out.
And they are fished out. And in the winter
the local boys wrap Alka-Seltzer in soft bread
and feed the gulls to see them scavenge
and take off, glide and they explode as
the base hits the acid of the gut, raining
feathers, blood and meat. Rats with wings
they call them. Not beautiful. Not the birds,
nor boys, nor sea in this hard place.
Ellen Dudley is the author of Slow Burn (Provincetown Arts Press, 1997). Her poems have appeared in TriQuarterly, Agni, and Massachusetts Review.
MAGNETIC FIELDS IN A GALAXY OF MUTANTS by Roger Fanning
Salt caves in New Mexico with creeping
exactitude, crystal by crystal, surround
canisters of Cold War nuclear waste,
sealing off the heebie-jeebies; centuries will pass
suchways. Once upon a time I scraped
beneath the kitchen table a fat magnet
to make iron filings (topside) do my bidding:
bristle, lean, lie down, be still. They stood
like soldiers, they sprouted like a corpse’s beard,
they froze the fluxlines of repulsion
and attraction. And Saturn’s gee-whiz rings
(I read this book to my child, you see, a boy
with a willful streak like a frozen river
through warm-looking brown fields, a mouthbreather
who mutters spells against his parents; his blondebrown hair
grows soft as duck feathers) – Saturn’s rings are in
reality ice and rocks whirling round – hunks the size
of the house we live in; flotsams fingernail-tiny,
flickering – prismatic, perfect, just near enough. So
one must hold with the hidden forces.
Roger Fanning’s first book of poems was a National Poetry Series selection. His second book, Homesick, was recently published by Viking-Penguin.
THE BEES by Jonathan Farmer
Rushed out of the dry stalks
they looked like seeds.
And then I heard them – the brittle
anger of them all at once,
called up. Long after
they had swarmed past, I stood
in the emptied field, imagining
that welling up, the sudden
allergic shock whereby
the guarded body ruins itself.
LETTER by Jonathan Farmer
Most mornings I wake late
and drift through several hours,
leaf through the paper, content
to let the things of the world pass by
uninhabited. I’m learning, at last,
to be happy, to live
with what’s here. But it’s complicated.
Often I find myself thinking back on
our time together and am amazed to find
how far it has receded, how much
it has changed. I don’t
mean to complain. There is
a new love, a good job, the promise
of more and richer days to come.
But no amount of reason or happiness
will disperse this sense I have that
a part of my life is ongoing
somewhere else – that you, with whom I have
no language not marked by lost intimacy,
live in other days, other places, carry with you
in ways I can hardly imagine
those shared failures which have become
our separate facts and are,
in the very moment of you or I
remembering or forgetting them,
being transformed. We had imagined
a life, our days gathering like
these birds I see today without you, each
encircling each other, above
the tree line turning into light.
Jonathan Farmer’s interview with Louise Glück was published in The Writer’s Chronicle, and he has essays and poems forthcoming in The Marlboro Review and The Carolina Quarterly.
CAB DRIVER by Ricia Gordon
His wife is still sleeping
when he pulls out of the driveway at five am.
His daughter, twenty-three and living at home,
wants a waterbed in her room;
she stays out late most nights
then comes in mad or disappointed.
When his son is home on leave
he spends his days burning gypsy moth nests
from the maple, or he walks to town
and leans against the hardware store.
He heads his cab out the highway by the river
to wait for his first call.
The fishermen are there now,
dragging their boats down the banks,
letting themselves drift.
He drinks the coffee he bought in town,
waiting to see the shining lines
cast across the water, the flash and bend of poles
as something takes hold.
CHIMNEY SWIFTS by Ricia Gordon
Mating, they rise out of sight
then lock together, wings outstretched,
and drop through heaven,
roll like pinwheels down toward earth.
And do they see on every spin a picture more precise,
the trees a blur of green across the hills,
then river flashing in between;
the grainy shapes of buildings,
then every leaf a shadow on the dirt?
And do they feel the force of falling
pressing at their ears,
their mate’s high screaming,
or do they simply lose all sense
and whirl in ecstasy? If that’s the way it is,
how can they pull away, reverse
their course, relinquish greed and hunger,
rise again like scraps?
Why don’t they drop, a scattered heap of feathers,
splintered bones,
their cries like broken glass?
MOTEL PIANO by Ricia Gordon
For a while, it was covered with a tarp,
but the tarp either blew away
or was needed for something more urgent.
Even so, the veneer still looks fresh.
I imagine stopping, playing the only piece I know by heart,
“Misty,” memorized when I was seventeen
and helpless as a kitten, although someone once told me
you’re as smart at seventeen as you’ll ever be.
The girl who died in the fire
wasn’t much older than seventeen,
the mother of two small children, who weren’t,
thank god, with her that night.
She was a week-by-week renter, the motel’s sole tenant,
the place, by then, already so seedy
most tourists would just keep driving.
Maybe the piano was the only thing saved,
hauled outside then forgotten.
Maybe someone dumped it there,
the way people leave a dog they’re tired of,
hoping someone with a heart will take him in.
Someone could play this piano,
someone who really needs to play,
like the woman who, after the Cultural Revolution,
climbed out the window of her farm collective,
walked miles every night to practice on a stringless piano
the music she had learned in conservatory.
Someone could at least bring it back to life,
replacing the warped sounding board,
the rusted strings, working the stiffness out of the hammers,
letting it sing a little.
Ricia Gordon’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Calliope, Marlboro Review, Worcester Review, and other journals.
TOY STORE by James Kelly
Lot after lot, pallet after pallet, lifted
from the dusty concrete stock-room floor
by the worn yellow steel hydraulic pallet-jack
and cantilevered, eventually
onto the plywood-structure second floor,
where the boxed, disassembled bikes are kept, and the playground equipment,
where you sweep each night, just before you leave,
scattering the moist brown sweeping-compound like seed
over the bare plywood, the push-broom’s scratch
like labored breaths, against the on-rushing dust.
THE HECTIC LIVES OF ROCKS by James Kelly
Beneath the forest, time is slow:
dark, wet, pebbled, and crumbling,
filled with innumerable beetles;
in the ephemera of soil, the rocks wait
for the next ice-age, when the glaciers roar South.
Rocks love scraping furrows, knowing
that warmth and light and air
come after. Glaciers melt. Lichen-itch
rubs surfaces raw, faint cracks are edged into
by water that freezes, that widens the cracks
into fractures, that chips flakes off the rocks’ surfaces
into soil. Buried then (as they once were
and know they will be again) they welcome
the thready root-tendrils (and beetles) that shape
into their graven, hidden faces
the stories of their lives.
James Kelly is a systems administrator and network engineer for a small computer services firm.
MEMENTO MORI by Pamela Kircher
I light a mound of leaves.
First a twirl of smoke,
an amber edging to one leaf, then fire
crowns one side of the pile,
changing the leaves from nubbly dun
to smooth grey and black
leaf-shapes with white veins,
a surface fine to the point of succumbing
to the inevitable weight of ash.
Flames encroach the far side, rove the leaves
From here, it looks like flame is separate from the leaf it burns
and more inclined to the blue sky that travels on and on without pause.
The burning side is haloed in flame, sinuous, lucid
orange that is light and holds light, and lets light go –
in a sudden, I’m reading what fire catechizes about the soul:
it uses us up. We’re given from birth to its long appetite
and our flesh to ash; see how it uses the body to move
from one world to the next. Don’t mistake the soul
for a pretty thing, aloft, alight –
it is dense, devouring orange
and its god is the far, far, blue, entire sky.
FROM THE FAR COUNTRY, HOME by Pamela Kircher
You are in the far country;
the Father is at home.
– Meister Eckhart
I.
I haven’t done it, but talk about it
the way other women talk about plastic surgery –
because it will change me that much
to lay a hen on the hickory stump,
to bring the hatchet home to wood
through feather, flesh, and bone.
Maybe I should be the one to hold one-handed the legs,
one hand bridging the back edges of wings,
to look and not let go no matter the thrashing.
Hang it then with a hitch around one gnarly
pus-colored leg to the hook on the shed door
And if the house cat strays near, she will crouch
mouth agape, breathing up the bloody thoughts.
II.
Bell jar of locust thrum
over yellow-cratered dirt freighted with black hens
open-mouthed, grey-lidded, splayed.
Nothing moves but some thing moans,
some whine –
chickens without listening speaking
of something far from what they wait for.
A figure crosses before the sun –
is that me too, that brief eclipse, arousing shadow
lifting a bucket, lofting a splat of feed over the fence,
triggering a din – chickens cackle to their claws,
scramble amid raucous squawks
abruptly tamped to steady feeding.
Beaks tapping staccato, beating dirt to more dust.
Longing is forgotten
in the resonant turn of beaks gleaning.
THE OTHER DEAD by Pamela Kircher
After they count the bodies in a country by the sea,
news reporters call them “the dead”
as we call bits of bread,
dry potato, corn kernels, and pie edging
“crumbs,”
sweeping the floral cloth
with the edge of a hand, the other palm the place
they tumble to.
They’re gone –
into the trash or out over the lawn
for birds, we say, or worms.
They never come back
but guns
go silent a while,
small ones snuggle in pockets; large ones
mounted on wheels or welded in the bellies of planes
are closeted like linen
in dry, protected places.
Reporters tell the story:
“48 dead today,
among them a nine-month-old and a pregnant woman.”
Meaning these count most
as in forty-eight fish, a big walleye, a nice bass.
Tell me the story of the other dead,
starting with one
boy, who should be learning only now
dark is a monster he can swallow
and swallow through sleep till day,
he is that big.
Instead he is dead
and his father and his best friend’s father, dead;
the father in the next block and a man who was nobody’s,
dead; the chess-playing men in the park and the corner store’s
father of nails, father of abandonment, bars, beatings and brawls,
dead.
They are a cache of corpses their women pick over like peas,
complaining, “oh no.”
Their women
who never spoke back,
who shrugged
when sons rifled their fathers’ pictures
of tits and shaved lips;
who knew
John, Michael, and Jim
buried the black snake with gravel,
captured bees in jars
and smashed them on the alley wall;
women with their eyes shut,
wishing aloud to god for a son
close-mouthed and home on time.
These women
will have to count the steps from the laying out bed to the door
more than once
and see in the jumbled streets sparrows sorting gravel
from splintered glass.
Look at one woman. As always
she starts by lamplight with a new needle
and the old thread, chain-stitching
the black year, his name,
taking time to show her daughter how
to fix cloth to the frame, place the knots
so stitches won’t slip, twist the thread
so knots won’t work free.
Pamela Kircher’s book Whole Sky was published by Four Way Books in 1996.
LOVE AND WORK AND PLAY by Diane Kerr
I was at the clinic, between patients
and the receptionist buzzed me
and I went to the waiting room
and got my husband just as if
he were one of the children
and we walked back to my office
and I closed the door and I said
he’s gone, isn’t he? and my husband
nodded and kissed me, and I said
he’s lost his life, he’s lost his life
and sat down on the little orange chair
by the game shelf and the art shelf
and the people shelf of soldiers
and clowns and cowboys and a ballerina
and a bride and groom and a baseball team
by the sturdy wooden dollhouse where babies
have been eaten by starving dinosaurs
and stupid mean grown-ups have jumped
out windows into a deep lake of poop
and a giant tornado has come
and sucked out a whole family
and every stick of sturdy wooden furniture
and it’s all fallen on top of them
in a big pile on the floor.
TWO MOONS by Diane Kerr
At thirty thousand feet, two moons
compete in the window view: one,
a high August chrysanthemum, the other
its wavering orange reflection
on the long sack of lake Michigan.
Again I will arrive, uninvited,
to visit my drunken brother,
brother, from the Greek phrater –
as in fraternity, as in fratricide.
Always he swims away from me, always
kicking away; I was the dark moon
curled against him in the first sky
of the first night, curled crescent,
I was the always other.
How annoying another self
shadowing the barely self, brother,
as in brotherhood, next door
to brothel, Old English neighbor
of breothan which means to waste away,
to go to ruin. I mean to intrude.
The 737 slides its shadow
across the calm evening lake
and drones down to mild clear Milwaukee.
He was the expected, hoped-for one.
It was 1942, before sonograms;
sometimes the two hearts beat together.
CLAW-FOOT HAMMER by Diane Kerr
It’s a mistake to believe
one twin always knows
what the other is doing.
I don’t know why
he drank himself to death
anymore than I know
what he was building
or destroying when he raised
that claw-foot hammer too far back.
We were ten, he had a Mohawk,
he was barefoot, shirtless.
From the back porch steps
I was watching him straddle
a two-by-four. He was yelling –
in a rage over what? –
when the claw-foot,
as if it had changed
its mind mid-swing,
swooped suddenly down
onto his skull,
then raked forward and up.
Why did he just stand there
silent, warm red rivers
already to his shoulders?
How was it I was watching?
That part I know – my job
was to run inside and tell.
TWO LITTLE INDIANS by Diane Kerr
Banker one; still can’t balance
a checkbook one. Beautiful
wavy-haired one; your grandmother’s
miserable hair one. Sturdy never
sick one; asthma eczema earache
high-fever bleeder always-got-
something one. Good sleeper one;
bed wetter. Pellet-gun pigeon
squirrel hunter one; stray runt
of the litter reject rescuer one.
Lots of friends one; loner.
Sharp dresser has girl friends
goes to the prom one. Knows
better than to argue with adults one;
little commie pinko reads too many books
for her own good one. Never left
town or us one; leaver. David
named for your grandfather one;
Diane sounds good with David one.
First born male child; female.
Heart’s pride; problem.
One who drank; one who didn’t.
One who died; one who should have.
HARVEST MOON by Diane Kerr
Halved and huge, a cut blood orange,
against the navy-blue sky the moon
rose bruised, cross-hatched, flecked
with starlings swirling down to roost
on the wire veins of the city.
The earth and moon love each other
only once a year this way. Your life,
your only life, it was the moment I knew
your life was emptying from you.
Stub-tailed, speckled, ecstatic,
the starlings sang the world’s beautiful song.
I stood in the parking lot and wept,
wept that you lay 600 miles away,
wept that you could neither hear
nor see the evening’s old orange opera,
and that you could no longer want to.
Nothing was garnered, gathered in,
and nothing was stored by.
They said you bled from every pore
and nothing, nothing could stanch it.
Diane Kerr’s poems have appeared in Kalliope and Southern Indiana Review.
ODE TO MY CAT EUCLID by Noelle Kocot
Mackerel sky above my dinner bell,
A chicken flies across the sun.
A tail floats around a corner in smoothest luxury.
Loving fool, you are no serf among my kingdom.
Piano keys breathe onto your lamp
As gravity wraps its vectors around your bones.
In the next life I see you batting
At the noon-toiled flies in your eyes.
For now its jazz can up swat down woo-wee,
Just glinting like a moon-child,
Scooting like a scooter should.
Noelle Kocot is the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune, which will be published next year. She has received the S. J. Marks Award for her work from American Poetry Review and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
JULY 4th by Joy Manesiotis
After the fireworks, our small group walked the road from the beach,
my daughter in the stroller, her hand nested in mine.
Small knots of adults and children moved with us, keeping pace
like commuters, and headlights cut swaths from behind,
throwing our shadows before us, denser forms
against the asphalt, as cars packed with other families idled,
nosing their way to open air. But in the walking, the air
was cool, filled with the sea, and the trees hummed overhead,
their branches reaching to canopy. And the child leaned forward,
caught in the river of our movement, head turning back and forth
in rhythm with our walking – watching it all: the trees’
soft rustle, their swaying overhead, the headlamps’ operatic light –
the rhythmic motion rowing us forward, yet suspending us
as the moment stretched out. Earlier that night,
we watched fireworks on the beach, my daughter asking
to move inside when the booming vibrated in her body. We sat
in the snackbar, its counter backlit behind us, peering out
through the plate glass window, and at each burst
of color, the bodies attentive on the beach silhouetted
for a moment, the sea lit a gunmetal green, small waves
cresting whiter through the glossy surface, the snackbar’s fluorescent light
throwing its counter and displays onto the window
the child needed to shield her from the fire in the sky,
the night held at bay by the reflections of stainless steel grill,
yellow bags of chips, handlettered signs in red
interposed and constant – the safety of the familiar –
while the night went black, then brilliant
in streams of color and smoke. As each pellet
of fire arced upward, the sky blanched white by its path
revealed the solid wall of smoke that refused to drift away –
the afterimage displayed before its detonation –
then everything – people, sand, water, sky – bright for a moment,
flashing gold, flashing red and blue, before falling back
into what must have been the murmur of voices,
but to us was only silence.
Joy Manesiotis is the author of They Sing to Her Bones (New Issues, 2000), which won the New Issues Prize in Poetry.
FOUR DARKS IN RED, 1958 by Caley O’Dwyer
(after Mark Rothko)
Red is brightest.
But scored by four dark horizons,
it is difficult to decide if red
supplants, or is blinded.
Beneath, the darks are less themselves.
Hard to imagine these darks without the red
from which they came,
though the purest is so surely empty
it could not come from somewhere
and have the somewhere
survive. How can we determine
things held inside,
when there is so much fire, when
everything we see could be a wound,
could be a window?
UNTITLED, 1968 by Caley O’Dwyer
(after Mark Rothko)
A quiet door.
A time span. Evenings
of so many stars there must be no ending.
The end is missing as the beginning is missing.
We’re in the middle of light and language.
Someone’s hand.
A clear window.
Whose hand we touch is less
than the hand itself, anchoring us.
How do we keep here
when the hands go?
Who is here? What is
to be made
of the day lilies bending in the yard,
bending to the water?
Caley O’Dwyer’s Full Nova was published by Orchises Press in 2001. Other poems based on Mark Rothko paintings will appear in an upcoming issue of Prairie Schooner.
AMNESIAC by Marcia Pelletiere
Repatriate the untenanted one
in the mirror mornings.
Follow the yellow intermittence
of a butterfly’s darkly rimmed wings,
follow the faintest threads of tones;
by the farthest delicate pauses be drawn out
to listen as clues collect: rosary of spine,
senseless scrawl of holy flesh, a case
for precious breath which
some wind had untransfigured
like a janitor who came in
to get a broom and left.
Remember now his tiny clatter of departure,
click and step, bristles brushing through
the silken web along the doorframe,
and then that little vacant shock of air.
POEM FOR A DOG by Marcia Pelletiere
I wrote a poem for a dog,
inspired by days with him.
I read it to him, spoke into his injured ear,
the one still sore with stitches, and let myself believe
that he understood the poem without knowing
any of my words, that he was healed and raised by speech
out of the limits of himself, as I would be,
and I wished this might happen, as I would be
if some angel hovered over my bed
and spoke into my injured ear,
and I didn’t understand one word,
but was raised up out of the limits of myself
and rendered well again.
MAN, MINE by Marcia Pelletiere
My husband
I used to think he was stony
granite, closed
to my influence,
stubbornly indifferent.
It’s not that, it’s that
he is a mountain,
shoulders like granite boulders, yes,
not falling rock,
solid rock, yes, strangely
tender rock, always,
even when his mind is elsewhere,
some side of him
turned towards me
and against him therefore
I throw at last all my crockery
the nervous dishes
I haven’t before
had the guts to break,
those brittle flowered
teacups of my mother’
smashed
against him and he
doesn’t move, cry or bleed
(though he is wonderfully hotblooded,
not reptilian as I had pegged him)
so my grandmother’s 12 plates,
and my great-grandmother’s gravy boat
on my father’s side, all these persistent
horrifying heirlooms
crumble, dashed against him
and he isn’t slashed up, the china bits
simply tumble off him
and
oh
how I love him.
Marcia Pelletiere’s poems have appeared in Southern Poetry, Prairie Schooner, and Painted Bride Quarterly.
RELIEF by Martha Rhodes
The churchyard, flooded.
Your prompt arrival –
White carriage, your wheels bright
as you flatten this pine-needled route.
And how pleasant the way
you’ve found my house (I couldn’t have)
and pass through the gate as if it isn’t
even there, perhaps it isn’t,
but the baby I hear singing is surely
here, yes? she, the one you really came for –
I am happy you remembered I’d be waiting too.
WHO SITS BEHIND YOU? by Martha Rhodes
Who sits behind you? Who, Mother, who do you talk to
louder each day and reach to and sing with in your thin alto voice
and why do you look at me as if I were the unwanted stranger,
as if I would rob you of that napkin you’ve been shredding since noon –
I want to be the one who holds you, finally, but this stranger
turns you against me – is this the only way you can leave me?
Martha Rhodes is the author of At the Gate and Perfect Disappearance. Her third book, Mother Quiet, will be published in 2004.
GREETING by Mathew Schwartz
She’s a stranger, and for several days, when we pass, she smiles at me
and says “bless you, child, bless you.”
It’s so startlingly unexpected and pure that I almost flinch.
She must see something in my crutches, in the way I walk,
the injury of a relative, of herself,
but eventually I almost get used to it, the way she stretches out
the word “child,” the way I bless her too, laughing.
How we started talking about her education, I don’t remember,
but when she mentions Catholic school, I remember my mother’s stories,
Sister Grace breaking the skin on her knuckles with a ruler,
and how happy I was that she could joke about it.
So there was a classroom and a room for punishment, my friend says,
and a coat closet next to that room, and the punished boy once
snuck into the closet and zipped twenty winter coats together,
dragged the whole thing down the hall – no one heard him –
and when the class came to see his suffering, everyone saw
how he marched out smiling, saw the splayed arms and collars and hoods
he wrapped around himself like a cape.
Even the teachers laughed, she said, even the teachers.
What did they think he did wrong?
What did they think he was supposed to learn?
What did it sound like, the stunned laughter of the teachers?
What did it look like, that coat, that punishment coat, that lop-sided, secretly assembled coat?
VISITORS by Mathew Schwartz
They’d float in overcoats
through rainy cobblestone streets,
or peek from magazines,
or glide through the grocery store.
That smoothness shined in the skin, the spindly
blue-gray bodies – the face,
that curious, knowing hint of a grin,
black sideways teardrop eyes
deep enough to contain
all of me, of them, the street, the world.
It was terrible at first, how they slipped
into the otherness of ordinary things,
and waited in my waking distances.
What comes back to me now is the stillness
in the eyes, how utterly complete it is.
If I keep my thoughts that still,
will I find myself somewhere in the sky, light years away?
Maybe the sky is a thought that takes years to form.
Maybe that’s what terror is: a stillness wholly other, wholly mine.
Maybe I move like thought in many worlds.
PHOTOGRAPH, FOR A CLASS ON PERSPECTIVE by Matthew Schwartz
She wanted to capture restlessness, I think,
or the way you’re drawn to what’s moving
if you stay impossibly still.
She nudged our heads to the left, to the right,
tried to get us to gaze at each other,
or at the candle she put there, between us.
When we moved or were too rigid for too long,
the three of us couldn’t help laughing.
We thought: friends don’t do this.
It was funny, how deception was there, and truth,
looking like some storybook romance,
like we were waiting for something –
sympathy, pity, self-pity.
We thought: friends don’t let you see
that bare expectation, or how their bodies
shift when they fear they can’t hide it
and you can’t tell if they’re watching or not watching
you or the light caught moving in your eyes.
MINOR PARTS by Mathew Schwartz
I flailed above a bright wooden stage,
hanging from Saturn’s wobbly rings.
Down there, I was the subtle enchanter
with a yarn beard, in a dragon kimono.
I was the fat friar cracking jokes.
I was the chorus voice, the inner voice, the whisper, the spell,
always playful and strangely anonymous.
I couldn’t claw a grip, and shut my eyes
to get at the real Saturn, any gravity it had
to catch me, but I had to let go
and instead of hitting the stage, I kept falling.
I wanted anonymous weight to hold me there.
I wanted words I could spin with
like the spinning planets
leaking back out into the spinning
inarticulate world, but then,
the floor I fell through was the world I knew.
I wanted my body to surprise me by being there.
Mathew Schwartz’s four poems in this issue are his first national publication.
CROWS by Diane Swan
I wake before dawn, my head filling
with the black cries of crows.
A week ago they made the Police Log,
“hundreds of crows hanging out on Orange Street,”
reported before a dog bite,
and after domestic assault.
Last night I prayed Hail Marys
for a boy, 19, who, told he had a month
to live, broke things
and tore his hands on the glass.
When they locked him in for good,
Sister Elizabeth picked up the telephone
and forged a prayer chain
to haul him back from despair,
or stretch across his shoulders
like the heavy arm of God.
Are these our voices then, gathering
in the early morning dark, hoarse
from pleading? Or is this rustle
of wings filling the trees behind my house
our night-thickened separate angers,
vagrant, criminal, hollering No!
refusing to move along?
THE YELLOW-EYED GRASS by Diane Swan
“There are no romantic ballads
about the yellow-eyed grass, no poems,
no Bible verses.”
– The Nature Conservancy
Oak Log Fall 2001
Technically speaking
the yellow-eyed grass,
intense yellow blossom half
the size of your fingernail
is “critically imperiled.”
In the full-color photo,
with its lash-thin stem
pinched between a forefinger
and wide, anonymous thumb,
its gold head nods
in the direction of its captor,
frail as any hero
in the huge fist of time.
Think of all the lost ones –
spiders and orchids, the pale
afternoons of childhood,
this may-be-gone-forever flower
pressing, with its fingerprint
and half-moon nail,
the only-here-once
of the world.
THE SWIMMER by Diane Swan
for my mother
At three every day Minnie changed
her apron, rocked on the porch
feeding you crystallized ginger
and terrible stories sprinkled
with gypsies and superstitions
that fell on your skin like fine
summer rain. You ran the woods
around her river camp, returning
at dusk, pockets full of arrowheads,
called from the first great darkness
into the windows of light.
Tonight as we gaze
across the burnt-out circle of the bonfire
she appears overhead – your German grandmother,
Minnie of the aurora borealis,
shaking the dust from a billion yards
of shimmering drapes.
The sky revolves overhead as she searches
for you, my mother, first-born child of the forest,
who once swam in the gleaming river
with black snakes, their heads like crooked fingers
around you, before you were afraid.
Diane Swan’s poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Ms., Boston Review, and other magazines.
DOWN by Daniel Tobin
Praise the many naked birds, their bodies
released after the hatching and harrowing;
praise their patience, their stunned altruism
under the knife, the carcass’s largesse
of softness, each underbreast a snowfall
suspended in air, each fallen weight
of eider inside this winter comforter,
all dulcet and lace where the lovers caress –
though not as prelude to making love
for they’ve grown bone-tired from the long day,
and desire only this modest solace
where they lie now in their proximate skins.
What did they expect the doctor to say
in the white room with its pale, diffuse light,
the lamp a barely audible simmer, a hum,
like the echo of too many years of sun,
its silent running of photons uttered
in cloud occlusions on the body’s braille?
Precautionary was the word he’d used,
and prepped each maculate interruption
along the man’s back, then numbed, then carved out
what might become transfigured into flesh
that feasts on itself from the cells’ hunger
as his wife waited in the outside room.
Let them rest like figures in a painting,
not the scene where the flayed god seems floating,
a feather from an angel’s hapless wing,
down and down into the keening women’s arms,
but one where dawn light asperges them with dew
as if each numbered wound were gift, were grace.
Daniel Tobin’s first book of poems, Where The World Is Made, won the Katherine Nason Bakeless Prize. His second book of poems, Double Life, is forthcoming in 2004 from Louisiana State University Press.
HER OBSTACLE COURSE by Beth Understahl
Laura needs an egg to make brownies.
She could go to the neighbors
but they have four or five kids
who are always losing toys in the bushes.
They did ask to borrow her broom once
when a ball was stuck under the porch,
but that was before Laura said she
wasn’t buying a candle from the school’s
fundraiser. She doesn’t speak
with the rest of her neighbors –
except the woman who yelled,
“You’re too far from the curb!”
when she was parking her car last night.
Now she wonders if there’s any way
to be sincere.
She told them at work she’d make brownies,
and there’s no time.
The last thing she wants is to apologize.
EULOGY FOR A BLUEBERRY by Beth Understahl
They buried a blueberry.
It was a small grave.
The two girls had been picking blueberries,
a bucket apiece in the bushes.
Each said a few words.
They buried a matchbox car.
Not soon after, Josie unburied it,
stuck it in her pocket.
Josie had many things in her pocket,
things she wanted to keep during the day,
to touch inside her pocket
or take out like the car to roll over rocks.
The blueberry was fully perfect. Jeanie set it
in the small grave. She said, “We are gathered here today
because you died.” Josie said,
“And because you didn’t have anyone
to take care of you.”
Their fingers were stained with blueberries.
And their tongues. Jeanie stuck a stick
over the white sand of the grave.
It rose up,
split like a double fountain.
Beth Understahl works as a research analyst at a legal consulting firm.
GHOSTS IN ROSES by Tracy Ann Zank
I held you for years.
At least what petals held
of you.
One, small as a crisp-edged cotton
and still near red.
The other, twice the first,
purpled to almost black.
These are left – from
a funeral spray,
my refusal to let
them full deep drop
into earth.
They are not you
but the long, dusty scent
of a wintered breath
once held.
OUTING by Tracy Ann Zank
He seems mostly caffeine
and endless hands in castle crevasses
that seem already right,
already fragile.
Mastering moats should be
his first task in castling,
even up in just-wet sand
high above tide, but he is lost
to the cause of carving.
He wants to help. No,
he wants to dig. Not where I want
but here, now, in the same space,
this same sand, and even if I say no,
his hands will find a language
closer to his own
and the walls will fall away.
And what he leaves standing
the waves will speak for and claim.
Tracy Ann Zank’s poems have appeared in West Wind Review, Rattle, Lynx Eye, and Sweet Annie Press.