Archive #47
May, 2017
Debunking a Harmless Belief
(a Metaphor) That no two snowflakes are alike is a more curious story to tell our children than the contrary, lies notwithstanding. Science has proven this assumption, this myth long believed to be true, to be false, but why? Why tell an identical twin that her left eye is droopier than her sister’s? Pack the common, customary, generic, ordinary, unexceptional flakes together into a patented, particular, personal, perfect ball and the warmth of your freezing hand will marvelously reduce it to an unspectacular puddle. This is the fate of all snowflakes. Have you ever seen two puddles that were exactly alike? For Claudia Emerson I discovered you on the same day I learned of your death. I’d heard of you, of course; what lover of poetry hasn’t? I spent the last seven years doing nothing but working, like Jacob trying to earn Rachel. Finally, I inhaled and you entered my soul. But when I exhaled, you were gone. You wrote of the late wife and then became one. Like a mother who’s miscarried, I ask, How can I miss someone I’d never met? Read the poetry of Thomas Locicero Read a profile of Thomas Locicero
Tree Surgeon
The tree GP attended first; pressed his cold stethoscope to the bark, listened, wasn’t sure. Sap was sent to histology; came back inconclusive. The tree consultant requested a twig biopsy; had more sap work done; reviewed a diagnostic imaging report. Spoke quietly as he broke the news. The tree nurse ticked the checklist box by box, the benefits and risks laid out dead straight. A fallen leaf was taken for consent. And now the tree surgeon’s ready to operate – he’s wearing boots and denim shirt instead of suit, a lunch tin where black bag should be the norm. No sterilised implements. A grubby pull cord yanked, the stink of smoke and petrol in the air. Visor snapped in place and noise to wake the dead. Read the poetry of Neil Fulwood Read a profile of Neil Fulwood
The World You Have
Given Us Called Life A long stillness The sun rises to another great day of joy war laughter and murder then a brief shower of happiness disease and dread Since we all receive sunshine and rain alike is not all this as it should be? Dark atrocities gentle kindness An apprehensive silence What's going on? There are cars insects Internet galaxies trees people guns’ sickness waterfalls bombs flowers Yet in our often bewilderment is there really something beyond a feeling of foreboding? A certain stillness The children of Terezin who never saw another butterfly saw a reality that prepared them in this life and for their tragic leaving Can you hear their singing? But suppose There is a coexisting radiant reality that we may not always recognize whose words we can feel when hearing the children’s star streaked voices for those voices may somehow free us from our pervasive anxiety? Today look The sunlight is reflecting off a coursing rain fed stream Read the poetry of J T Milford Read a profile of J T Milford
Five Haiku...
first date … on to the autumn leaves we draw a heart ❦ under the spring flowers my stillborn ❦ daughter draws a snowman on the window … spring cleaning ❦ longest night … I write one more letter to myself ❦ Alzheimer's … mother wraps my doll in her cardigan Read the poetry of Archana Kapoor Nagpal Read a profile of Archana Kapoor Nagpal
Two Eyes
They periscope out of sand scrubbed holes, scuttle and dig tunneling foamy brown sponge. Scatter now four slide drunken in a crazed haze. Shuttling down into inner sand highway. Through slime and maze and back again to dance a tangled crusty seaweed jig under hot June sun. Wretched and wary of crashing wave as tides revolve till night shutters and moonlit eyes shift and dissolve into the mist of wave shadows. Read the poetry of Michele Riedel Read a profile of Michele Riedel
Construction Site
Glass-less windows, supported by scaffolds, allow moving sky to descend and intrude on the latent scene of projected lives and routines. A mist imbued by aromas of brine and the drying twines of foreshore weeds, passes like a breath outgoing, along naked halls in the half built house; reclaiming the ascending face of post-modernity and civilised pace, slow afternoons that will stand secure on foundations of an exiled Nature. Though perhaps the Blood can yet return: when a wife slams a door into the face of an erring husband, or a teenage girl surrenders her first timid jaw to the kiss of a Summer's love, The music of the world has learned to command its echoes thus. No concrete conceived can clear away the will, the heart, the soul, the power. Read the poetry of Gareth Spark Read a profile of Gareth Spark
The Jams
Hang around the coffee shop. Pawn change off cigarette smokers. View all the value menu options. Remember when music channels played videos? Old Navy commercials featured the jams; khakis even mannequins were afraid to wear. Skeletons hobble for the exit. The matchbox was used, number twenty. Skaters knees scraped easily, kids played outside. We are sinking. Carrying our stuffed animals to the movies, voting for people we wouldn’t be caught sitting next to at lunch. Etching our initials into the desk with dull pencils. Pushing our Trapper Keepers across the bottom of the well; Gumby & Pokey movements. Claymation me; when our eyes did not watch the hours on the clock spin away in eight hour figure-eights. I’ll keep my shirt with shoulder pads. Pull the sheet off of it. Those years fading quicker than cap guns exploding. Who cut the cheese? If you’re da bomb, remove the air from the Sun Chips bag. Nothing is free. Not even hugs. Big sunglasses and stale thoughts. Even the irony of rain on our wedding day is now a dream. Someone beam me up green slime for the trip game show host personality and comic bubbles to keep me away from current entanglements. Read the poetry of Alyssa Trivett Read a profile of Alyssa Trivett
Sky and Water
Water and sky indecisive, light flitting around corners, thunder mumbling curses, a low energy kind of day I recall a day exactly like this, so long ago, when we walked between the drops to the 10th Street Pool Hall to lay our fortunes down on the Steepleton tables, greener than any pasture, leather pockets yawning. Entire lives were spent and measured in racks of nine; I still hear the clack between the thunder claps. In the end, we walked out the door pockets empty, hearts full, into the long shadows of the waiting sullen universe. Read the poetry of Mikels Skele Read a profile of Mikels Skele
from Selected Haiku
rain pelts the meadow driving all the birds to nest-- trees' outstretched arms ❦ adept at silence sounds ring hollow in my ears a shattered bell ❦ gently flowing brook the mistress of sudden storms rampage with anger ❦ life should be easy effortless words in a song yet it always ends. Read the poetry of Thomas Canull Read a profile of Thomas Canull
Beyond the Milkweed
It was her birthday. She was only five the dawn we went out to look at roses in Grandma's garden while everyone else was sleeping. She loved them all every color but stooped the way little girls do and pointed to wings of a Monarch on the ground splayed by death fresh with dew underneath milkweed Grandma planted just last Spring for Monarchs to lay their eggs. She asked if it would fly away and I said no. Monarch mothers I explained lay their eggs in milkweed and then sleep. That’s why she and I must be careful not to make a sound as we tip-toe over there to the roses Grandma planted beyond the milkweed just last Spring just for her. Read the poetry of Donal Mahoney Read a profile of Donal Mahoney
Capri
roofless cubes, spidery with wire cakes of azure and enzian; above at the Villa San Michele Rilke smiles down at the broken beaches, at coves of defiant waves, compacted sea Pompeii a chessboard of honest stones open to a sky of hushed shouts; we huddle in a boned frame of another life, a stopped day Napoli warm and secret, olive-eyed, an infinite beauty makes a new face as the gaze ape-like from our bus; an act of moment Read the poetry of Leslie Philibert Read a profile of Leslie Philibert |
Under a Bushel ☊
I don’t want to lie still under this rock, like a pool of stagnant water where larvae culminate and grow. I would like to be laughing at the birds in flight, a minister to their bird-needs. I would like to take off this thick sweater, cover my limbs with sand and wait for the tide. I don’t want the lost love of the past to stop me out of fear from plunging into a faith-induced joy, stop me from painting my skin with visions that swim full-force in my brain. I don’t want to be the child chained to the park bench, hearing voices no one else takes seriously. I won’t be swung from this dead vine, hollow as the fear I abhor. I will be a fountain, running, contained, self-sufficient, a fountain that children make wishes in and animals find drink. I will be acceptable as I am, flowing, something to look at. Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
Read the poetry of Allison Grayhurst Read a profile of Allison Grayhurst
Visions in June
Each time I round the bend on this forest path down to the river, I am tricked by a mountain laurel in full bloom on the far bank. From this high angle, its soft, pink blossoms peek out the dense foliage in the shape of a girl poised to dive into the cold water. Thoughts of trout and hand-tied flies dissolve. Suddenly, I am a simple village boy sneaking along River Akheloos in Thessaly with a man's spear and dreaming the glory of the hunt, when a nymph glides out the river, her body gleaming; her arms gather me to her, my lips tremble…. With the next step, perspective alters, the vision evaporates. I am again wearing waders, fishing vest, holding a fly rod. When I come to the bank across from that flowering bush, I wade through the water, take her hand in mine, and kiss the flesh of that delicate petal. Read the poetry of Gary Metras Read a profile of Gary Metras
Long Pent
Confined to my cell in the dark prison of my heart, I endured for lifetimes, each day an anguish unrelieved by hope early extinguished by daily beatings. I could not escape relentless assault that banished my soul, devoured my dreams. Then my daughter was born. In the bright discovery of an unblemished life I was regenerated, rejoined humanity in a flood of feelings that melted the bars that kept me in isolation. Love entered my heart, demanding an end to bitter exile. Read the poetry of Gary Beck Read a profile of Gary Beck
The Return of the Magi
My mind is missing a vital part – a tiny pendulum cog like those that switch back and forth inside old pocket watches balanced with a chip of diamond and necessary to basic function. Without it, I don’t see the need for polite conversation; my smile has developed a mechanical hitch which stalls it halfway. I have given up on epiphany, on cognition – afraid that any thought would lead me to retrace my steps, go over the same ground, rearrange the syntax of a single sentence in the hopes it might say something different. Anything other than: Your journey has been nothing more than wasted effort. Maybe this is preferable to the discovery that my fallen star is crowned with thorns. Read the poetry of Kerry O'Connor Read a profile of Kerry O'Connor
certain acts of magic
i saw the back of a bird today. Not the whole bird, that would be a confession. But the glimpse of his hind quarters, his left foot the one he plants on the headstones of civil war soldiers. Then I thought, this is a sort of magic, the way flying compels us; how the jazz of it kickstarts our reasoning. How Whitman and Miles Davis were somehow complicit in our planetary woes. How wanting to dance, and then dancing is how we choose the half seen. That's why I don't discard my old databases, My IBM, my COMPACT, my E Machines, my Acer. They clog my attic with their old songs, their old dangerous rhythms. I still have a SONY tv bought brand new in '87 and with the converter box it still shows a lovely picture. But it weighs 100 pounds and is too heavy to carry to the curb for bulk pickup. So along with multiple, wired mouses and old keyboards with sticky keys it too sits among the others. Sometimes we keep things because losing them is too painful to discard. Others we lose because keeping them is too painful to hold onto. Like broken snowblowers. Joel Osteen. Love. And all the saved photographs you took while in it knee deep. Then you slam the cover of the album shut which gives mortality to the entire bird. Then you close the attic door. Read the poetry of Dana Rushin Read a profile of Dana Rushin
The Moon Is in the
River of Heaven ~After Mei Yao Chen I hear my wife cough. She has coughed for months. She refuses her breakfast. She eats weak soup at lunch. Her face is thin as paper. Her arms are like chicken bones. At night, she tries to muffle her terrifying groans. She was once young. In a bag of wrinkled skin, I look for the beautiful girl I married long ago. Winter is coming. I watch a squirrel gather nuts from a pine tree. I feel too empty for grief. I despair for my wife, But my sorrow is also for me. At Dawn ~After Ou Yang Hsiu Crows pick at rotting bones. Skeletons stare eyelessly at the desolate sky, searching the distant stars, where dreams reside. But they see nothing, through the endless hours. In the frozen air, the crows scatter like leaves, seeking a place to hide. Leaves fall everywhere. The stars look down, but not in prayer. Life is uncertain, those stars tell me, and it is always unfair. Read the poetry of George Freek Read a profile of George Freek
Chaos at Tranquility Base
A dream, it was, lying softly reposed In teddy-bear comfort 'til your cry erupted Like a serpentine quake-wave A boiling out vocal thundercloud That shattered my frail dream shapes So that my sleep fell away Like torn crystal shards Heavy lidded eyes strain to focus As irises widen and Mission control fumbles With its unwilling appendages No rest. A new wave hurls boot-heavy feet To slog through sand-dust Making slop-flop noises as I Rush to calm the epicenter This base, Tranquility, you and I We build from conquered years But new landings disturbed the dust Of Tranquility’s sea and swirled in our eyes Blind fingers search the form Finding feet and head transposed Softly raise to my shoulder, sobbing eyes Tangled blanket, thickly wet, an un-tranquil sea So small is this, maker of storms That cradles to my chest. Your step lands mixing moon dust With bottle warmed for my charge. A landscape re-shaped by storm and quake-wave Like Spring-Earth's garden We stand renewed As Tranquility welcomes the dawn.
The Place Where The
Stars Are Buried I’m on my way to the place where the stars are buried under a roof of rain. I won’t get lost. I’m following the silver snail trails and the muddy pools with the little shimmers of spangles. When I get there - to the place where the stars are buried. I shall dig a little, dig just enough to let a glimmer of light out. Just enough to let the love sparkle and sizzle in the light before it burns. After the End The sideboard was full of magazines. Not whole magazines but pages torn from them. Pages of recipes. Meals never eaten. Exotic desserts never attempted. Guest never invited or entertained. At least the furniture had been used, had had many years of use. The clothes had been worn, the pictures admired and enjoyed. But the recipes were the saddest thing. So many of them for so many people who never came. Read the poetry of Lynn White Read a profile of Lynn White
The Cycle
Let’s talk it out, I said, and we went on talking until the words became honey dripping down a face being murdered by bees. And from there we rolled down a bloodstained road, entwined in each other’s forgetting. Day after day we rolled and rolled until we went over the edge. We married and bore children to divert our attention until the days ran dry. And now no one remembers the stones we swallowed, or the times we collided in the graveyard of shadows hanging from the trees. The Reflection Kneeling over the water I reflected on my own reflection, but unlike Narcissus I did not fall in love with myself, but asked how and why I’d made it this far with so little understanding. And when I rose to my feet knowing that eventually I would be hungry again and want to maintain a roof over my head, I realized there would be certain things I’d have to keep doing and continue to say to those of my kind. And so I went on my way with a little perspective of how it would be for the rest of my days... Read the poetry of Jeffrey Zable Read a profile of Jefferey Zable
Final Arrangements
I breathed-in the lines of your face, Left drops of who you were on the arm of the chair, wrapped my fingers around unspoken, hushed, half-whispered words—tumbled. Tripped-up, fallen. I stared down your scars—your hollow eyes, guilty that they made me squirm. Small round math lines /tunnels, knives. I know blood was pushed in a mad dash. They spun your stuff around tricking it into clean. But nothing was new on you. Soon you would be all that's left of nothing. Short hair in spiked-up gray, snipped slick down at the sides so you could be less sick in a smaller space. You swallowed up those voiceless screams-- brave rock-climber folded into last year's size. I was screaming for you and you just wanted to live. You asked for nail polish in deep blues-- velvet blues you called them. You wanted to face the next stretch of your journey with your nails shaped into neat half moons. You cupped your hands around the tea cup sipping it like you had all the time in the world. But you were already gone by then. I was just borrowing you. Read the poetry of Amy Soricelli Read a profile of Amy Soricelli |
Woodworking
While our space grabbed us a luxuriating cabin with solid walls and mosaic hexagon glasses, you knew I was not there yet. you knew I would have struggled for someone who had done you injustice or thought ever more need for crayons that my jumpsuit wasn’t cool or storied or something opened my belief for fullness. While the chances left... you wished I could stop at the woodwork, which reunited our dreams of previous nights. Read the poetry of Ann Huang Read a profile of Ann Huang
Darkness
In times of darkness I have tried to keep my heart pristine; to blur the lines of day and night and live there, in between. How many books do I neglect, their pages still unturned, insisting that I must protect this numbness I have learned? What music have I muted, what colours have I dulled, what tragedy eluded and what ecstasy annulled? In times of bleakness I have found contentment in the dark; for quiet leads to clearer sound, and black to brighter spark. Read the poetry of Marsailidh Groat Read a profile of Marsailidh Groat
Apocatastasis
Walking down my way to hell, my sins start flashing through my mind. My innards are burning, apocatastasis or eternal condemnation? Sin will always take you further than you had planned to go, costing more than you had intended to pay, keeping you longer than you had wanted to stay. Where Do I Belong? The future coming closer and closer The already gone, swivelling repetitions a dystopian reality, my mind falling from itself into nowhere, into a black hole, into abyss Hope, a sempiternal illusion hot metal melting into nothingness veritable census of the dead where do I belong? Existence slipping between parallel universes a hundred shades of gray and snowflake obsidian my desire for place always denied between now and forever, I rappel down into oblivion Read the poetry of Sofia Kioroglou Read a profile of Sofia Kioroglou
A Slight Revision
"It’s a lot like what you're doing right now," I said to my roommate, the landscaper, as I sat at the patio table in our backyard one August afternoon before a family barbecue. I was revising a poem about irony that day, playing endless hours of eye ping-pong with each word. Until finally, I hoisted the scribbled draft to the sky like a sacrifice to the gods crushed it within my hands then hurled it onto the freshly-cut grass. "I still don’t see the connection," my roommate shot back as he scooped the paper ball from the ground. He was surveying the yard with an empty grocery store bag in one hand and a garden trowel in the other, looking for any unwanted gifts left by his ferocious Shih Tzu he notoriously dubbed Bark Twain. After a few more minutes of careful observation, my roommate walked back to the deck with a high head, unraveled my crinkly failure and began to study my poem like he did with our yard. "There's nothing wrong with it," he asserted as he read it over and over. "Look again," I insisted, "because you missed something there!" "Where?!" he demanded as he waved the paper in the air like a white flag. I snatched my draft back from his grip and smiled, "It's under your shoe!" Read the poetry of Cord Moreski Read a profile of Cord Moreski
An Old Shirt
An old blue shirt I have: frayed collar, color faded from midnight deep to Prussian tired; here a greasy residue where gravy fell; here a tiny rip torn by a nail; the button threads beginning to fail, so I don't bother unbuttoning--just pull it down over my unpoetic gut. It used to be a shirt for showing up, but now it's best for staying away. A shirt for undoing one's particular demons, for slouching over poetry or doing the dishes. A kind of armor I wear against attacks of hubris; now the light of poetry glimmers upon it, making it more than it is. Before long she will tear it into rags for dusting or washing the car, or square it into blocks for a quilt, or maybe it will shroud the one unlucky cat for its sepulcher. Read the poetry of Will Reger Read a profile of Will Reger
The Tao of Zebras and Dessert
The Tao is dark and unfathomable. How can it make her radiant? Because she lets it. ~The Tao Te Ching Capitulation of stripes, no two patterned alike, brilliant canvas older than the world as dark and light. A poem within can shift the graph to balance rhythm's blood. What changed you, the doctor asked, pressure lower, sugar too. I've moved myself, been moved, the taiji heart's reply, in points and curves like caramel through cream. Everything swirls, even a murder of crows the fog blows in from nowhere. Softer, more clear, like an infant before it can smile, echoes original strings let fly return from past and future to the palms. Down to up, back to front, center axis snakes, full pulse and slither, no two chords the same. Breathing ground to sky forever woven, roots and leaves, even the wind can't flow without someone to touch. We notice music arrives. We sing the silence limbs can't hide. Sweet sweet shiver of air and rain washes the heart awake. Apple blossoms flare. A rabbit nibbles spears so green its ears quiver fire. Read the poetry of Janet Aalfs Read a profile of Janet Aalfs
Deep Thaw
Beneath the thin sheer line of ice Below the horizon In the cold Are waving ferns and bobbing greens In the pond depths of my mind It is winter And the outside realms are cold and dry Shifting low shadows that last not as long as summertime But the currents beneath the mirrored sheet Are strong and moving Constantly Chillingly Hiding secrets that only emerge When warmth arrives Are you my thaw? Are you the hot breath that blows on my surface? Your pursed mouth exhales with hope Longingly eyeing my depths Hoping for a glimpse of my soul The silt at my bottom. The rocks that hold my secrets. Are you wanting to sink into me? Lower yourself and allow my twigs and branches green To brush against you Feel beneath you and around your slick skin? Are you brave enough to walk across my thin shell And hear the crack as the ice breaks? Will you raise your hands above your head And surrender To all that is within me? Read the poetry of Ellen Conserva Read a profile of Ellen Conserva
Incantation
Take an airport parking slip, mix with boarding pass, sprinkle with train ticket add hotel room key, stir in phone messages, simmer with postcards. Take scrap talismans and inhale deeply. Now say London. Repeat until ephemera reshapes, turns into a paper airplane big enough to lift you over the sea. English Pastoral ☊ Oxford summer the cottage doors open to the garden where wood pigeons coo & distant laughter drifts over the garden wall I sit at the end of a long table paper rustling in the breeze watch a butterfly flutter in float over the forget-me-nots time stops, freeze idyllic electric blue sky tufted with motionless cotton wool the city in my head goes mute as I succumb to countryside content with birds & breeze Enjoy this poem in the PoetryAloud area
Read the poetry of Collin Kelley Read a profile of Collin Kelley
Trench Soliloquy
Dusk/ bomb-light. My eyes telegramming My heart STOP My mouth tasting magnesium white STOP Ears cradling wave upon wave of air breaking on Labyrinthine coast, Martello towers of tiny bone fracturing. Looking down into hands which I no longer possess I somehow morning-catch the letter carried by moths from the Wonderland that is my pocket, And bend my knees closer to the black loam soon to be my bed. I try to make out vitality distilled into the green of the grass but light leaches from the booming sky, Rendering colour to spirit shades. I collapse into The smallest shape possible Like a broken heart. My heart -An Anemone in a tidal rock pool, Somehow I must read your words. And there it is My Lucifer A glow worm In the tarry night Hanging onto the blade of grass before me- One of many across the dwindling horizon- Changing the scene to a love story, Stars for the Fallen, Twinkling like childhood past, Torches lighting a rabbit tunnel back to Hope. My hands become my own again and softly I grasp the creature; I hold it up gently between Forefinger and thumb It's incandescence Revealing words from you- Crawling to rescue mine in these last minutes, lit by glow worm light, Luciferin and Luciferase... In this stage of the life cycle The glow worm Exists only to consummate It cannot eat and will Die after a few days. The light flickers in the cavern Of my hands. Around me -a furred halo. Read the poetry of Rushika Wick Read a profile of Rushika Wick
Old Horse Barn
Twenty-six daily mucked stalls for a bevy of broken down thoroughbreds still hoping for the dreams their thin legs rest on. A water trough, a feed box, old hoses that crack in winter, harbinger of flies in summer, clouds of DDT. A teen ripped from my city neighborhood, home, friends, school by my gambling father. Isolated now, listening to Hambone, an older black farmhand, stroking one of his thirty-nine cats, stroking my pain. He urged me not to run away. Read the poetry of vern Fein Read a profile of Vern Fein |
