Archive #45
March, 2017
from Selected Haiku and Tanka negative space -- enough empty for a flower ❦ a fox runs ahead of me in the woods i wonder if he too is chasing the wind ❦ failing to define reality sand drift ❦ so many dreams left unturned yet this pebble in my hand just smooth enough Read the poetry of Caroline Skanne Read a profile of Caroline Skanne
Flight It is most like freedom; skipping the brook, slipping on acorns and stalling in flight. Our escape on a wet day is picking us up. Our rocky way is lined with maple trees, their sun-trapped leaves smoothing the day to a bright canvas. Where we cross the border, we cut ourselves off from the battle behind us, delay the struggle up ahead. Our eyes shine in the clearing, sipping the sky like a faithful wine on a fine evening. We could settle for this but the season persists with change. So we soar to a height where the wind’s sorrow swallows our words and the land moves swiftly beneath us. And when all that is left of our rising are those few minutes no longer ours to keep, we raise our hands and set them free. Read the poetry of Julia Stothard Read a profile of Julia Stothard
At Low Tide
Already a ghost at twenty-three, the singer Tim Buckley howls, scaling octaves, stretching out syllables until they dissolve in salty mist. His fog of consonants and vowels, salt and smoke, hovers, grazing the skin of the dark-haired woman standing by the window, holding a candle in a baby-food jar. Outside stairs to the second floor quiver beneath keyboards and bass, heavy footsteps of a ghost. She turns away from the sea. Cupping her hand around the white flame, she blows out her candle before the voice breaks the last barrier between indoors and out. Nobody walks out on damp sands, so far from cold water, much further from yesterday’s warmth. Nobody walks out at low tide. Even the seagulls dissolve as if they were salt. The woman at the window has turned away. Her man will not climb up to her, not this morning, not tonight, not when the fog wails and salt embitters the air. Read the poetry of Marianne Szlyk Read a profile of Marianne Szlyk
from Selected Haiku
clothesline - the evening fog wears my black frock ❦ honey moon - first snowflakes gather in the empty nests ❦ old attic - the doll also has chapped hands ❦ widow's house - a cherry blossom twig into the letterbox Read the poetry of Lavana Kray Read a profile of Lavana Kray
Smallness
I live in a crowd of fakes smallness rises with age my mind has ceased to think new metaphors hardly happen hunger keeps me awake all night I mitigate minginess the inner lives emptied and filled with fresh stresses too many fault lines run through to make sense of the divide my passion itches and prompts I nuzzle the virtual too it’s the same virus aground the same hackers that hurt the vigor and rigor of the new, left, or pushed behind whatever the remedy wounds take deaths to heal Read the poetry of Ram Krishna Singh Read a profile of Ram Krishna Singh
Getting Ready for Night Out
They say it’s much better to use a ceramic knife. It doesn’t oxidize vegetable meat. She first rolled the beet over the flat counter – to let the juices stir. Then cut it in half. She needed only a few drops for a blusher. On the shelf in front of her, beside his favorite tea cup, she found cinnamon. Just a pinch of this spicy heat will act as a bronzer. The index-finger on her right hand she gently dipped in the ashtray – to give a soft grayish glimmer to her eyelashes. And the final touch – carmine: a dripping sauce of red, succulent melted cherries she mixed with three tears of her own blood she had harvested earlier from her left thumb. Now, who can resist kissing these pulsating lips? As she was waiting for him to pick her up, in the last minute, she adorned her right hand with this piece of baked clay – perfectly matching her makeup. Read the poetry of Maja Todorovic Read a profile of Maja Todorovic
from Selected Haiku
end of the affair rain drops off the blossoms ❧ autumn dusk floating on the waves a broken daisy chain ❧ speed dating a tornado travels the coast ❧ dandelions in a spring soaked sky ponies gallop Read the poetry of Nancy May Read a profile of Nancy May
Trophy Life
You are given a vision before your eyes when The thorns beyond the limelight Drew a red shadow around the window. You needed to make a movie on a Film stolen in the cold and snow And your fancy dimly reappear Borrowed by a plane in the vast of Grand Canyon Writing into the wild The crayons expose nostalgia Scooping many fissures The pressure turns and unites Beyond the power of your hands Nudging the white plains You could see what others don’t We do become younger Read the poetry of Ann Huang Read a profile of Ann Huang
Choice Gains
Patience, n. a minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. -Ambrose Bierce By the water, a bird is caught. Sharpened claws are cloaked with thick woolen mittens. The owner resists the urge to scratch off The artificial warmers, since hunger, Suppressed, provides heat enough. Rough knots in the lower stomach betray And reveal the pouncing need to devour. Hours pass. The claws start to retract. Lips start to purse. The wrists are relaxed And the gaze? Heavy at the lids. The prey. The bird. The meal Is set free at the price of the bigger creature's will of won't kill. Big fish come closer to the surface. Only then is resistance released. The feed provides heat enough. The need to devour is at once realized. Actualized. Minutes pass. The claws are full of meat. The mouth makes chomping motions. Wrists are intent to dine. And the gaze? Heavy at the lids– Asleep. Read the poetry of Grace Pasco Read a profile of Grace Pasco
Last Impression
On the day he died, she was mad at him. Not just annoyed, not quite furious, but mad enough to not talk to him, to keep her distance. And then the distance overtook her. It was a bad bookend for a long life together. Ghosts go wandering with whatever they packed at the end, and so he would be sorry forever for some little thing that didn’t amount to much. She tries to suppose that the dead forget their troubles, especially if they were forgetful in their lives. Over time she found evidence to question this. The gate to the barnyard was left open. Tools found lying beside the car. And now there are muddy bootprints just outside the back door. These infractions made her stamp her foot and then she cried. At the grave, now, the earth has settled. The wind has taken away the yellow gold maple leaves. The first hard frost has finished off the flowers. His name on the stone seems crooked but maybe because of the hillside. Far off a church bell starts to ring in the town. I don’t know if saying sorry to the dead really works. Or if the dead can say they’re sorry. It would help me to know this. He watches her from some distance. She shakes her head, then smiles. He wanders away. There’s an end to it. Read the poetry of Lee Kisling Read a profile of Lee Kisling
Dinosaurs
You offer words older than yourself and carry books thicker than your skin. I relish the sting I can cause by mocking your mistakes, because it is my job to be cruel. It will be years until I ache for you the way you do for me, that I might catch your attention, that we might really know each other, because how could anyone else understand? I’m scared of how distant adults can be, scared of the habits we could learn. Do you remember when you bit my toe and drew blood, and I pulled the flaps of skin apart like a mouth to make you laugh? Do you remember when I told you a secret, and you tried so hard to tell it, but you didn’t have the right words? Please forgive me for the times I didn’t listen, didn’t play with you. I want more than ever to hear about dinosaurs now. Read the poetry of Marsailidh Groat Read a profile of Marsailidh Groat |
Chiaroscuros ☊
Dancing their world like dappled ghosts my shadows dissipated to chiaroscuros-- fleeting images of moon yielded slowly to dawns of warmer days as frozen fields broke from their fright and shimmied forward to sun. Then sunflowers, wheat budded up to radiant dreams-- Unfolding seams of life & mind bloomed to flower at first with hesitance, at first in shade, and then into a frisson of Light as she opened her wings to spring. Only then I could hear shining ripples of Time, the horizon on her salty breath, her silver terns swooping as seconds ticked into a glow of glistening song. Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
Read the poetry of Judith Brice Read a profile of Judith Brice
New Word
[skuh-too r-ee-uh nt] (skəˈtjʊərɪənt) scaturient I become geyser flashflood vaudeville showgirl in feather boa hussy in stilettos exclamations em dashes volcano ashes hurricane surges I leave myself breathless Antidote even as the darkness oozes overland, it spews into the sea spewen… spīwan… speien… spȳja… speiwan… spuere as verb…as noun…eleven hundred years of vomit human vomit oceans of vomit-- but even then…even now…I commit hope….hopa…hoop…Hoffe—with you Read the poetry of Karla Linn Merrifield Read a profile of Karla Linn Merrifield
A Moment
"...the wave breaks over its own breaking" Jorie Graham, Never a misty Gulf Coast morning, white-capped waves lolly-gagging onto shore and creeping onto the beach before sliding back into jade overlap one wave after another leaving a wet stain of tan on mauve sand a sort of hem to the slippage back until waves meet in-coming out-going capped recapped talking in a megaphoned whisper and occasional Clap out beyond where waves KABOUSH the breakers fold and roll spreading a white froth for the lazy stroll shoreward and then retraction and again the frothy lace slide and spread the stain of wetness and scrum of newly formed jade wrinkles slowly advancing like old age. Read the poetry of Wayne F Burke Read a profile of Wayne F Burke
Doppelgänger
I knew it wasn’t you that summer afternoon when I decided to quiet my head for a bit, wandering along the crowded boardwalk by myself. Not because you only preferred the beach in September to avoid the swarms of drunk college kids and snooty tourists, or because you were caught up with some odd jobs that day, making repairs around the house. But simply because the little clenched fist pounding against the wall inside your chest decided to cease one day about ten winters ago. Yet there you seemed to appear, anyway: doppelgänger, stunt double, déjà vu look-alike, with your back to me holding a beach viewfinder between the palms of your hands, swiveling its chrome-plated shell like a gun turret as you stared through the tiny lenses to examine the shore. So I carried out my own investigation and tiptoed in your direction, but when I got three feet from behind you there was no urge left in my body to shout your name anymore or tap you on the shoulder in order to debunk what I already knew. All I had to grasp was that brief moment we both stood there together on our own pedestals— searching for something more beyond the naked eye. Read the poetry of Cord Moreski Read a profile of Cord Moreski
Touching
While out walking after my winter storms have finally begun to subside A blue and yellow flower quietly touches my sight With soft petaled feeling offered and I not yet understanding return her gaze In some mysterious way I knew then that my summer would again bloom As will fields of red yellow pink and lavender in blazing sunlight As the days slowly grow the petals leave that in an early time somewhere We may again touch as wild ones always do
The Thunder Never Repeats Itself
The motherless gusts have long since carried away your indigo sandals. Unfortunately, a color such as indigo is compasslessness, And incapable of finding its way back home. Bare feeling: the rain's brethren will have the final verse about this night's worth, As I remember held hands; our patented spiraled seashell clasp, Whilst being read to on a back porch of a gentler time-- The thunder never repeated the same story twice. Mother She's mountain-like in reserved watchfulness, Other times, as loud as a hurricane trying to set the fine china for Christmas dinner. May she saunter and stomp past a mortal century, Sharing her extremes with every predictable world. Read the poetry of John Carroll Walls Read a profile of John Carroll Walls
How Others Do It
Two idiots like us Who planned love like a new car Who bought the floorboards old So with each step our new home moaned Who mapped the lock And learned to speak fraternal talk Who toiled to resist slog A balloon on our wrist in permanent bob Who got drunk with the guests Painted like rage the right walls red Who saw the new oven installed Where designer heat is focused and trapped To roast the meat for today’s avid son Read the poetry of Ana Caballero Read a profile of Ana Caballero
Contemplating people,
I have observed ☊ the vast divide between the clean and those who choose to remain unwashed. A child will feed pigeons, happy in the dust. A bull pierced through the shoulder sinks to his haunches. Never was red so dull. The female form excites the muse but all becomes ordinary in reduction. A platter. A bowl. A long-legged table. While masculinity resolves its headache in paunch and penis. Hills rolling unregarded. A study in plane and colour is as academic as mud and blood, piss and undressed lamb. We have eyes that slide past drooping nose, and oh so many teeth. Sharp. White. She scrubs herself in a blue room. He plays ball on the beach. Lover of sand. Here at last, a man with a guitar. To wake me in my grave. Carve your tune in basalt. Singing the seas to a crying woman. Where she reclines nude under stars. We cringe. We crawl. We crow. So little time to find the soap … Rinse the sullen crimson tide from your fingers. Ponder the inevitable fall. Cracked heels. Rise from bed. This life. Uncovered. Art. Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
Read the poetry of Kerry O'Connor Read a profile of Kerry O'Connor
My Spider
I’ve invented a spider, the green-back-spider: arachnia verdiga domesticus. Its habitat: suburbia, the foundations of houses and middle schools, where boys with handfuls of spiders still chase girls. Not tarantula, no black widow, it resembles the daddy-long-legs. But isn’t. It is the green-back-spider. It happened like this: I was painting the cellar hatchway forest green, painting and whistling when a spider started to climb the metal wall, shaking its feet free of the sticky paint. To save its life, I swept it aside with the paint brush that left its back green. I watched it angle across the grass, perfectly camouflaged, to the side foundation, which it climbed and hung vertical, drying in the sun, my green-back-spider. Read the poetry of Gary Metras Read a profile of Gary Metras
Song
For a few nights before the clocks went back and the Sun's sinking coincided with my heading home from work, I heard a bird sing. At the top of concrete steps littered with pizza cartons and cigarettes, in the cradling twigs of a blackened tree, this bird, perched restlessly, sang. These eyes, tempered by smoke and tile, sodium lamp and television, trembled at the flickering breeze, burnished sky and the sixpence Sun, dulled by decline. I listened to the bird, forgetting about birds, replacing myself, the concrete, the words with unstained, unique melodies. I have not seen the bird since, nor can I recall the song I'd heard disturb a warm, March night, when I ached, and my eyes were sore, but know that in the crooked feeling of dictated days, hides the healing strength to strike them straight. Read the poetry of Gareth Spark Read a profile of Gareth Spark |
Distressed Jeans She is wearing her distressed jeans again my fashionable daughter skinny jeans intentionally destroyed acid washed, sand papered pumice stoned, tumbled in gas washing machines faded & ripped at the knee scraped & shredded at the thigh priced at a premium by Calvin Klein, Armani, Levi really? I want to wrap her in my arms & say: wait no need to race to what-comes-next soon enough pleated skin, nagging knees soon enough holes in your heart no designer can repair no need to leap over yourself to some frayed future time will snip & slice soon enough my daughter, much too soon enough wait Read the poetry of Claire Scott Read a profile of Claire Scott
Composure
When he whispers incantations Across the ceremonial-pit In late Winter The last snow-drift Orbits the tree tops Like smoke On a morning stroll Headed towards Infinity’s skylight. Praise abounds. The sun soars. Raven gives a jocular Caw matched by The smiling Elder Who has My father’s eyes And more. With hands wide open We spread the wealth. Read the poetry of Stefanie Bennett Read a profile of Stefanie Bennett
Night Rover
The fish hook lights, Ex'd in their standing, burning yellow bait, staggered in the course, like picked ribs stood on a wet flensing stage. The emptiness softly burning, above the rushes of the blood and the marrow, the to, the fro, red and the white, along the silver spine, the monster's innards hollowed out. My onward moves in straight lines, with the back end canvas of a white van in front, framed to one side, that glare of the white marrow rush, to the other, the dark bracken, where the wild dogs wait. Read the poetry of Christopher Hopkins Read a profile of Christopher Hopkins
All the Poets
These days, it seems all the poets love using the word: “Rhododendron.” Geography is inspiration. Botany begets creation. Esp. in a Mary Oliver poem! Don’t get me wrong-- I like Mary Oliver. Her poetry is very peaceful. Full of animals and nature. Often depopulated of people. Everyday someone new succumbs to her spiritual spell. (I wish my books sold half as well.) And then there’s the rebels: The beatnik poets who had a thing for the Buddha. Lots of poets now worship Walt Whitman, wish they wrote Howl, won a Nobel like Pablo Neruda. In the end, all the poets are the same as you or me. We have moments of clarity, and many moments when we are mysteries unto ourselves: two-legged, Janus-faced, perplexed, Searching for the perfect words in the perfect order on the most elusive subjects. Read the poetry of Daniel Klawitter Read a profile of Daniel Klawitter
Burial Mounds
When I was a girl, a young girl, I went on a class trip to Marietta, Ohio to see the Hopewell Indian burial mounds, smooth green arcs of grass and dirt. Beneath, in dark soil, remnants of bodies-- metacarpal, skull, half a tibia. I loved maps as that young girl, paper ones with precise pleats like the skirts I wore to school. They had colors, straight and broken lines, legends that marked railroads, mountains, coal mines, lakes. I wanted my mother. Wanted her to explain myself to me, decode my moods, teach me how to be comfortable in my skin. Show me her secrets. How she smoothed ruby color on lips, left an imprint on a glass of scotch. I am no longer that girl, no longer young. My mother has no more secrets. I trace the map of her body, its changed topography, sagging muscles, wrinkled flesh, vacant eyes. Electrodes under skin spark her heart, a rainbow of pills keeps pressure steady, calms sugar’s spike, thins her blood. The looming mass of her wheelchair casts shadows on the floor. Read the poetry of Valerie Bacharach Read a profile of Valerie Bacharach
Falling Up
She would lie on the grassy hill – and imagine falling up The feel of the Earth behind her – as they fell together They sailed through constellations – soaring weightlessly as one She led the way fearlessly – brave and flying free Her sadness dissolved like the sky at dusk – as Joy filled her with suns Tanka someday untethered I will surely rise to slip between the light of the stars Read the poetry of Kat Lehmann Read a profile of Kat Lehmann
Hive
Not far from now and not far from here you will look for ways to surrender. "Each time my heart is broken it makes me more adventurous" O'Hara wrote. But all lies, are at best, inaccurate statements. So this month, another one without intercourse, when a red moon came to me in that movie about a fist, and me, caught licking the salt from walls and measuring the water line from last years flood, I drifted back to childhood tea parties. The ones where the grownups stood and sipped pretend air from tiny cups as if grace could be imagined however extreme and love, unsure of it's rightful task. Then I had a kid. Trembling. Slippery but loyal who sat with her legs crossed below her reaching up with those same empty cups of tea. Beloved: Soon the interminable heavens will give back it's angels to the death walk first intended. And we dumb-ass Americans will think them either bees or Martians and stay in our hive homes. Read the poetry of Dana Rushin Read a profile of Dana Rushin
Introvert
After the talk, I become like scattered seeds on concrete. I find the money jar empty and my stability, ruptured. After social meanderings, after loose conversations that never utters the words ‘death’ ‘loss’ or ‘God’ then I am everywhere, pinched apart, thin pieces of my solitary form. Days of quiet bring me back from the drug trip where others thrive but I am like clay drying in the sun, too much, too fast, too little time in the shade so that I crack then split, and what I was cannot stand whole. Mornings of clenching to the things that keep me upright, build again a solid self until I must slip (a fresh water fish) into the salt waters of acceptable social norm. Read the poetry of Allison Grayhurst Read a profile of Allison Grayhurst
Rescue Me
There are dogs on the sidewalk. Their coats on magazines asleep against headlines, their paws curled underneath faces, closed up, hidden. I heard the homeless girl takes a train from Syosset and covers herself with dirt somewhere in Queens. I wonder what people think when they watch her scratch herself or un-tuck her plaid Abercrombie shirt from her Old Navy Jeans. I wonder if they picture dirt under her fingernails, mad grabby hands in subway tunnels, hollow screams for help-- or her last summer-camp with that horse named Storm, dancing fairies rising up from the hot-dog campfire. I heard those dogs are rented. Costs $25 for the day, and with enough Benadryl in their water bowls, they can sleep on a subway grate or in the biting cold. People donate to girls with dogs: storybook lives rescued from mountains, deep snow drifts, a run from a hairy monster. The quarters drop like hope, or rain. One tinny sound against another. Read the poetry of Amy Soricelli Read a profile of Amy Soricelli
Elegy for Toothless,
Beloved Rabbit A rabbit has no song, except the quiver of her nose, or the easy way of her soft coat, loose over muscle and bone, or the rhythm of her nibbling from hand or bowl, or of anything she finds on the floor: the cereal spilled, the Timothy hay strewn, the strawberry tops dropped intentionally where she can find them. She says her bit with scut and speed, with running in circles, chasing her rabbit friends, lolloping on carpet or grass, leading the way into hijinx. What was best in us we saw in her. Her eyes were pools of ink with which she wrote the moon when it shone into her kitchen corner, and the sun sparkling on rain-wet grass. Everything was hers to sing: the light, the grass, the love she shared with her humans, the many sounds that reached her lissome ears. Free of fear of any foxes, she dozed with perfect dignity, soft as a shadow she slept, soft as a shadow she passed. Read the poetry of Will Reger Read a profile of Will Reger |
