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Hamilton Stone Review #33
Fall 2015
Poetry
Roger Mitchell, Poetry Editor

 

 

William Aarnes
calendar

It’s Wednesday

and late this afternoon

she’ll be fitting in

the pressed-for-time tax attorney

                                    at the Crowne Plaza

while looking forward

to her monthly all-nighter

                                    at the Regency

with the laidback anesthesiologist. 

 

Last evening

                                    at the Ivy

the developer

who was her tipsy big-tipping self.  

 

                                    As a rule

                                    the arrangement requires

                                    that the client

                                    will leave at least two hundred

                                    for whoever cleans the suite.

 

Monday

                                    at the Loews

the CEO who was impotent

with worry about falling earnings

and his downhearted wife.    

 

                                    Back in touch with her parents,

                                    she tolerates their sufferance.

                                    She’s reassured them,

                                    glossing over the frightful fixes

                                    and stressing her fluky escapes,

                                    that she can now afford      

                                    to be choosy.

 

Tomorrow  

                                    at the Depot

the poet who calls her

Lady Bountiful                                             

(but has yet to confide

the source of his wealth).

 

Friday                         

                                    at the Radisson Blu    

a first timer,

a comptroller. 

 

                                    Almost twenty-nine

                                    she’s invested enough to retire

                                    but figures she can work,

                                    by keeping longer stretches

                                    of her calendar free,

                                    at least five more years.

 

Saturday

                                    at the Residence Inn

the nervy venture capitalist,

with whom, snuggling,

she’ll exchange advice

on how to convert the chancy    

into the enriching risk.

 

 

 

grief                                                  

He’d say her looks

had little to do with it.

No, what did it for him

was their coming out

of Hitchcock’s Family Plot

and her disagreeing

with his enthusiasm

by muttering, “Good grief”

and then pausing before saying,

“Well, I suppose

grief can be good.”

 

The next moment he proposed

and (whatever did it for her)

she exclaimed, “Good grief, yes!”

 

But good grief, he’s found,

involves the complications

of buying two urns,

of deceiving the children

right at the gravesite

and of deciding not to tell

the widow he’s married                                                                    

(she still has her looks)

about the ashes

locked in his desk.

 

 

 

 

 

Ace Boggess
My Failure as a Witness

 

out of touch with the dazzle of heavens

I am blinded again by cloud haze &

 

city glow that burns penumbral

like secondary light off a bonfire

 

I would search forever

but keep missing the obvious

 

the fish in a murky pond

bees circling flowers at my feet

 

my breath crafts a second set of clouds &

two keys that will not open any door

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Bolling
Icarus Again

 

Much must have figured there.

Flight from a vengeful king,

maze of stone and blind ends,

above all that beast of male body

and a bullish head.

 

Add on a youth’s urgency to

dare the patriarchal heed,

break free to soar, soar.

Great lure of sun brighter

than the best of jewels,

glitter in a lovely lady’s

eye.

 

World has its rules.

To trespass there is to

fly on faith untested

as though gravity’s long

reign might look away

in act of pardon.

 

Downward then this

tumbling lad who may,

may not have dreamed

his end before a sea’s

great mouth opened

to receive.

 

 

 

 

 

John Davis
Such Art

to let the butane fire burn down the house.   

Let’s get up close and film the glass curl

 

of the tidal wave. Last week’s apple pie,

so sugary, hides under a moldy halo of fuzz.

 

Why deny the handsome curve of the crowbar

the boy is swinging while bashing my car?

 

On nights like this I hold my breath, watch

a mosquito bite my arm, fill with blood,

 

explode, stain my white shirt. Never mind

my execution: on frosty mornings I love

 

the feel of manila rope against my skin.

 

End Zone

I want to ride in a lime green hearse.

Tricked-out chrome. Mag wheels.

Thumping bass that pounds the county

that says to the dead I’m coming.

Wake up the bad boys and girls. I’m coming.

 

We burn rubber—a mother-mean squeal

that singes like a Fender guitar.

Crank it up. No black silence.

No ghosting through air like a spare tire.

Dissolve my sins in champagne.

 

Lower me into mud—O that

empress of the hug, that drug.

No more worries that I’ll turn to stone.

Let my words get down on all fours

and beg forgiveness from the alphabet.

 

Of course I will miss the hiss and howl of the woman

without a shadow who belted out the blues

but that’s just the winter wind, weed-clumped

laying down a bass line, meeting bad dreams

face-on, slamming out a jazz rant—

 

but man, enough beatnik-dude and black beret

deejaying for one day. Let me adore your

mother-of-pearl complexion, your lips

that sting my lips, that ring my tongue

that swirl and swing that help the horizon sing.

 

 

 

 

 

Camillo DiMaria
C Flat

My grapes are important to me. You would

appreciate this; you’re a poet. Look at this leaf,

gentle to the eye, whereas that one is warfare.

His forehead seems a pediment where the doves

of thoughts roost. I hazard to the edge

of a speed trap and do the frug around it, knocking

down formations of upright wickets. It was every

 

much a campsite beneath a stoplight. We could only

stay for about a minute and then we really had to

pout as we backed off, making our pilgrimage.

Freemasons scatter a horde of hayseeds and that’s

how I feel all of us people are all over this section

of the barn dream or the non-dream of a barn,

which are two hues of yellow: Sunlight with dust

 

motes and then sunnier light with dust motes. 

Wattage that aspires toward depravity, farce

that’s been skirting around, whapped into shambles;

holds true that the resurrection is imminent

with crude incantations. We’ve got to stop. Make

a carbon copy of this Polaroid shot. I guarantee

it won’t sell.

 

 

 

Inferiority Complex

I’m kind of tangential the way I am. Playing

Hacky sak in a Hackensack parking lot

with a few friends outside of a funeral home,

offering them Sucrets as I wish I was tiny enough

to lie down on the drain board in the bar

next to my tip.

 

One guy told me there was a lot of spectacle

in my work. Maybe. Maybe there was a corruption

on the file. The socket is definitely stripped. That’s

why it’s not catching, it’s not catching. Alright,

alright, enough with the repetition.

 

This young lady doesn’t like lime. What a travesty…

as the tandem axle shatters in my dreams

my survival instinct is mediocre at best. A wad

of cash or a waft of air is one in the same

in the end. Do not mistake these facts for adages

or maxims or air-condition pressure hoses.

 

Interesting visuals. You said that they killed

the elevator, then quickly corrected yourself

by shifting to the word alligator, and I made

a note of that, and here it is in my notebook.

Seated atop a citadel one gets to notice things

like Y is a crooked letter, and that they made me

boss, but don’t want me to enforce.

 

They got me on a technicality. I get mad at you

in a constructive way. Is this too labor intensive

or what? Revel in your time, buddy, and get your dab                          

of the brush. My work will ruin your life for the better.

 

And it adheres…

 

 

 

 

 

Keith Dunlap
Close Enough

Sinatra sang “Witchcraft” in the background,

casting a magic spell.

You were the one to hum along,

although we both knew the song pretty well.

We sat shoulder to shoulder,

like two lovers crowded into a photo booth,

only now the album of our youth was spread across our knees,

as we browsed through snapshots taken long ago:

There I was hanging from a tree,

a confetti of leaves stuck to my tattered sweater,

the delicate haze of two days without shaving

spread wide by my grinning chin.

And you, your hands thrust in

and stretching the pockets of a borrowed coat,

your hair a whirlwind of pleasures.

You lingered as if to recall

a thought that would have gripped you then,

how already we together were older than original sin,

and did not need to win from each other

what we were to fight for all our lives

and lose from each other over and over again.

And if I had reached out then to touch your hair,

once lustrous, but now stiff and a little gray,

perhaps you would have been startled,

perhaps you would have relented;

but better to let pass this moment between us,

a moment close enough to sex,

let the dark catastrophe of our constant longing

remain an unspoken trust,

and not ruin a lifelong intimacy

with the stale breath of a scavenger lust.

 

 

 

 

Superman

We used to fly down hills

in the grip of our own velocity,

the frames of our bikes shaking in our hands,

our feet tripping over each other faster than we could run.

 

There was no harm in falling—it was part of the fun.

Our parents weren’t around to scold us.

And when they were, they didn’t care.

There was, after all, “revolution in the air.”

 

The grown-ups mixed cocktails, played bridge, were late getting home from work.

Like stubborn oracles, they appeared mostly on holidays,

when everything was arranged so that they could present us

with the toys and games we craved, without too much fuss.

 

There’s a picture of me standing before the Christmas tree,

which is three times as tall as I will ever be,

and draped in lights, beads, and glass ornaments,

like a green-limbed, many-armed dowager aunt,

propped up in the corner for the occasion.

 

I am wearing the outfit of Superman,

too big for my shoulders, its baggy folds

cinched around my waist with a bathrobe pull,

my hands on my hips in a suitable superhero pose,

invincible, even in my Clark Kent glasses,

the empty box at my feet,

like a hamlet I have just rescued from destruction.

 

 

 

 

Watching an Eighty-Four-Year-Old Man on a Bike Get Hit By a Car in the Whole Foods Parking Lot

He fell the way an inappropriate joke falls

on a tense crowd. Everyone too paralyzed

to stop him. He fell the way

the bag of groceries left on top of the station wagon

fell as the driver slammed her brakes:

frozen corn, organic macaroni, canned peas

spilling onto the parking lot like glass beads.

His bike slid awkwardly out beneath him,

and when he landed on the pavement,

like a man suddenly seized with a need for prayer,

there was no sound, no cry of pain,

just the ladder of his parts collapsing.

As the young woman vaulted from her car,

her beautiful green eyes trembling with disaster,

the flume of her Irish-American hair aflame in the sun,

like an emergency flare, he sprang to his feet,

waved, smiled too broadly, and shouted “I’m okay,”

so that his assailant began to laugh uncontrollably with relief,

laughing and crying at the same time,

rivulets of tears on her freckle-stained cheeks,

as he put his arm around her shoulder to console her.

 

 

 

 

 

Cal Freeman
On Leaving Anchorage

I have slept long years in the sunlight

and watched the sea ripple silver

 

in the pitch-black afternoon

until my cigarettes ran out.

 

It’s geology that dwarfs us,

 

the thaw of epochs

that never quite begins,

 

the incommensurate scale of violated

body to silt coast to ocean,

 

the green and purple curtains

that hide the cold Cook Inlet.

 

It’s this god-forsaken family

 

and its blighted history,

this genealogy that makes me

 

small.  I close my eyes, a phosphene

 

becomes a woman in a red anorak

stuck in a mudflat as the tide rises

 

like spilled ink.  I am not

 

the guilty one.  I am a tiny organism

rasping the light season,

 

suckered to a stone in swale muck.

 

Here they do not prosecute the guilty.

 

 

Fight Song with Turtle and Mallard

There is a black cough in the water.

There are no innocents.

 

Tadpoles swim in the shadows of ash limbs.

 

This is not the frog stuff of a fable,

though the face transforms and blurs

 

in the riffling capillaries

of the brown-green creek

 

and each moment is an instar

in the long deterioration of the body

 

(I read of how the turtle’s liver

does not slow down with age).

 

This is princely nothing;

 

decades past the initial crimes, it is time

 

to appreciate the aesthetics of the damage:

the dead birch reaching toward us,

 

opalescent swirls on the surface

of the water.  The mind elevates itself

 

like a pedestrian bridge

between the neighborhood and park.

 

We can count the stoneflies

and catalogue frog croaks

 

and marvel at the elegiac numbers.

 

It gets tempting to call what’s left

resilience,

 

the mallard passing

beneath the bridge, the turtle

 

hunting snails along the sandy bottom.

 

 

 

 

Epistle to a Thane 

Dear loose-twined leaves of sweet clover and chaff,

heart like a vole in the thresher, dear myriad

deductions for tardiness and un-mowed stubble,

austere son of a cunt counting silver to a Beethoven

scroll in the mechanical piano, who will feed us

when what we’re owed is less than what we owe?

Dear demesne sprawled beyond your purblind sights,

dear phallus palmed in some interior red-curtained room,

out here the wheat shimmers like a sea

and gold is the color of pangs along

the stomach lining and the lining of the spleen.

Dear terraced Phaethon yoked to noble generations,

dear patrilineal blessing, virtue powdered

clean of its mammalian scent , dear pitchfork-weary

patron of just rewards, we hear you are in the market

for a walking horse.  Dear patrolling myopic eye,

gas-lit gravel walk, procurer of plow-mules

and grist for pone, I keep chewing straw and tasting sweat. 

                                                                                                                                       

 

Epistle to a Lazar

Dear cigarette butts

in a dime purse and no words

to curse a traffic light,

dear war of nicotine and Haldol

 

in a gnashing mind,

dear stuffing shocked

from the right sleeve

of a coffee-splotched coat,

 

nails scratching sores

to pustulance, your body

is an outmoded machine

that channels prophecies

 

no one else hears

in your generation’s most ridiculous

rock n’ roll.  You try to feed

the Internet jukebox coins

 

but cannot find the slot.

Your SNAP card will not buy

the Billy Joel song

stuck in your head.

 

Dear earworm, dear yellow

broodmare’s teeth, dear crashing

party, dear fricatives

spat like hot oil, this Monday

 

they will pick you up again,

though they will not understand

and there will be many questions

about what to do with you.

 

 

 

 

 

Howie Good
What a Bad Week for the NRA

Let them go ahead and put

all four years of college online

or a row of Port-a-Potties

on a Civil War battlefield.

I don’t care if it’s sacrilegious.

Morning is still morning

the next morning, just as when

we were kids and did it

for the first time, or maybe

the second, fumbling

under the small black moon

of the NRA sticker on the back window

of your dad’s old Plymouth.

 

 

 

 

 

James Grabill
from Double Helix, a long poem in progress

&

 

Possibility at the end

of “A Day in the Life”

from Sgt. Pepper converges

 

and peaks as the pitch slides higher

and then higher still, extending

through harmonic intermolecular

architecture, propagation of fingertip

transfer, the foundational electrification

through guitars into neurochemical leads

 

as ride the slow swaying walk, entrusting

indigenous findings to senses of the animal

that carries being through the world.

 

Maybe we’re sensing a split-second river

of determinism altered by sharpness

or scent, say, of hair, or sense of being

at home, where the head is cradled for sleep,

 

as genetic gyre revolves around equal

interconnected gyre co-creating energy,

inclination, and cellular body, the electrical

 

star-spike melts of tundra sending out

and receiving long currents of flux,

centering inner centriole sun,

where the primal is conducted 

 

back to the stone furnace fired up

at the bottom of the skeletal stairs,    

 

while the brain dreams a person up

into capacity, whatever the species,

however unknown the future may be.

&

 

If you’ve always known you’re someone

extraordinarily small in the big picture

or the company of post-modern social construction

projects or perhaps back-country wildlife, you haven’t

been alone, but one of over seven billion outcomes

of the effort to people Earth. Maybe you have a medical

history that shows you’ve always been only so large.

 

It could be you were quite good at internalizing the picture

you had of yourself when you were a kid, trying to fit in,

and some of that persists. Where we are now, it’s likely

we aren’t feeling the burdens shouldered by billionaires.

Maybe some of us have been saving the mind for purposes

we’ll understand better later in life. Some of us may just be

knuckle-walkers, squat, with diminutive mammal snouts

and small-time backgrounds, having been reared to be aware

of our smallness, knowing the world is what is pushing back.

 

Whether you’re only trying to nail down a sign

with your name on it or to call your animal back

for a night’s sleep, if you feel small under the night,

you aren’t alone. Still, the sublime can happen

to anyone. Perhaps you’re the size of a lacewing

Chrysopidae attached to a twig or a Burying Beetle

that emerged from the soils sixty or so days after

your mother and father biblically knew one another.

 

Maybe you don’t expect to receive the full recognition

of a North American billionaire attended at each turn

by serving persons. Maybe you’re small, no question                                                                              

about it, and liberated from needing to own a mansion

with oversized doors and marble steps leading down

to your atrium where visitors will be greeted by a bust

of Adonis. But like the planet, we’re only so large,

 

with limited resources and yet much untapped

capacity. And all this could be our good fortune,

as what supports us surrounds us

with meanings able to enlarge

the interior of a conscious person.

 

 

 

 

 

Nels Hanson
Turtle and Butterfly

Black-bordered orange Julia butterflies

in the Amazon in Ecuador drink

turtles’ tears. Moths and even bees

taste slow, shelled creatures’ scaly

cheeks to take in sodium and other

needed minerals. Rain Forest inhabitants

rely on global winds bearing nutrients

from deserts of North Africa but breezes

reaching Amazon’s far western regions

rain on seas and eastward zones most

essential sediments. Sweet nectar

butterflies and bees devour contains

too little salt for metabolism and egg

production. To drink others’ tears is

lachryphagy, though butterflies also

sip urine of animals, muddy water by

riverbanks, sweat from people and

clothing, tears of crocodiles. Turtles

don’t mind, except when wings obscure

their view of predators. In ancient Persia

sultans home from war measured wives’

“tear catchers” to see who missed them

most. Glass bottles in Rome, some four

inches high, interred with the beloved

and sealed with porous stoppers allowed

tears to evaporate. When jars went dry

mourning ended. The Greeks’ psyche

means “spirit, soul or breath,” often

pictured as a butterfly. The turtle is wise,

long-lived, and patient, oldest of animals.

Souls of the thirsty drink tears of the living

to start the journey toward resurrection.

 

 

 

 

 

Tricia Knoll
White Girls

Cede to other women skin

tints of caramel, taffy, and fancy maple,

heady Jamaican vanilla extract

in amber glass. The glow

of copper wire. Oxides,

raw or burnt sienna.

The roughed-up walnut heartwood

deepened on roofs

of the Lower Ninth Ward.

How black poets sing

of themselves. 

 

Eyeball my elbows. 

Cabbage whites,

garden spawn. Folded water

in a rapids’ raceway. The color

of a hand-carved horse-chestnut bowl.

The background of poker cards

common like toothpicks,

rolled paper on the Marlboro,

whipped froth of separated eggs.

Salt. Milky soap. Cores

of candy apples and bananas

and the sultry slink

of the first pair of evening gloves.

We are wedding dress

and baby’s breath.

Pale like airborne chalk and moist smoke,

the stretch-skin of tambourines.

 

We are leather-bound family bibles

and derivative dictionaries

made of pearl linen cover cloth.

Our ivory endnotes press

shut glossaries

of the little we know.

 

 

 

 

 

Susanna Lang
Wintering

A rabbit has holed up in my yard,                 

warm heart beating in the dark,                     

dark flame feeding on itself.

 

We’ve seen its hunched shadow by the fence at dusk,

the black pearls unstrung on the snow.

And left a few leaves of lettuce, parsley stems—

 

though you grumbled it will eat your tulips when they bloom,

might already have chewed the bark of your Japanese maple

to get through this long bleak month.

 

Still, in the sleepless night I warm myself

with the thought of that small hearth

beneath my bedroom window.

 

 

 

Park at Evening

Even in a park where baseball matters more

than anything else and trees are planted in rows,

the young trunks bagged to hold the occasional rain—

never enough—through weeks of drought, the old

trunks turned and twisted in dry wind storms, some scarred

by lightning, marked with plastic ties; at dusk

when the dark swifts skim the fields now emptied

of players, and lights turn on above our heads,

dogs pull on their leashes and runners count in time

with their music; even here in this nearby park,

the branches heavy with leaves and reflected light

cast secrets over the path, while from the benches

I hear the murmured beginnings of stories or maybe

the middles but not their unimaginable conclusions.

 

 

 

Michael Lauchlan
Work Canto

You stepped off a curb,

caught a toe in a sewer grate,

and saw the street approach.

 

As pain shot through

your face, also a thought--

tonight will be long.

 

Table to table you drift

in shadows that hide stains,

cheap place-settings, salads

 

no longer green, and three

new shades under one eye.

You dread meeting friends flush

 

with wine and charm, dressed

in the latest; tonight you punch

an order for steaks and drinks

 

and wince, seeing Parker drag

a new girl through the gloom.

You try to turn your absurd

 

shiner toward the kitchen door

and its bright obscurity.

You OK, man?

 

It’s been too long. Say hi

to Sylvia. You look rough.

Just got in from Chicago.

 

This town’s dead, but it’s

home, eh? Can you get us

a table before the lady faints?

 

Count on Parker to not look

closely. You begin to guide

him toward a four-top, though

 

your boss will give you shit.

Parker finds another pal

introduces Sylvia, and acts

 

surprised. Damn, man

they told me you were dead!

He returns to your parade,

 

repeating the news as though

you could have missed it.

I thought they killed him

 

after the loan scam crashed.

Maybe I heard wrong. The dude

does look lively, though

 

he’s ordered the shellfish 

so tonight could turn on him.

At last, they home in

 

on their table. You’re

weaving between chairs, drunks,

and servers when you see her,

 

just as he does. It stops

you cold because, when he split,

she rolled her car and flew,

 

they said, over the guard rail.

She looks good, his ex,

nodding at Sylvia and leaning in

 

to breathe some words

into Parker’s ear, then slip

past and drift toward the bar.

 

He's pretty gray by now,

but you take a drink order

and run. You get Sam

 

to cover and slide through

the kitchen doors out

to the alley as if you smoke.

 

Instead, you suck in rank

trash and airborne soot 

from the block’s last blaze

 

while a horn blares and you

press against the bricks,

aching to be anywhere else.

 

 

 

 

The Bullet of Time

A friend was shot, but what of that?

Many have surely suffered more.

I know the look his wife wears,

know the bullet’s bony path,

 

the cost and pace of repair,

so I can’t help intervening. Madness,

really. In my little town,

a thousand die every few years,

 

many thousands bleed on streets,

gasp in ERs. But only now,

seeing this track of cause and cause

and effect, I try to extract a slug

 

as no surgeon could. I’ll return it

to a cold gun in the hand of a kid

not twenty. The easy part’s done

in this tweaking of tenses. But,

 

teetering on the verge, we can’t

continue without asking, Why not,

finger latched to trigger, shoot?

 

Here, reversal gets complex,

though the object remains simple.

What’s smaller than the absence of a hole?

Given the moment, a gun will fire.

 

We must bring shooter, boy

or man, into view, if only to send

him elsewhere, making a deli’s soup,

cutting a muffler from a car,

 

learning Spanish to impress a girl

who seemed to brighten once

when he read Lorca in class.

To alter a path requires such

 

effort, making time retract

weeks, a month, years--so much

must shift in one life to close

a wound. Our task expands.

 

 

 

Beacons

A gibbous moon waits

behind a cloud-scrim. We sync

our longings, lend breath

 

to delta blues, yizkor, hymn,

threnody. No real moon rhymes

shiny lines to sell beer.

 

The thruways and alleys of Cairo

and Kansas get no bright lyrics

seeping down from a scarred face

 

as gaunt as the girl who keeps

a neon shop open late, keeps

shelves and counters stocked

 

with nothing anyone wants

except maps and bitter coffee.

 

 

 

 

 

Rita Maria Martinez
Jane Eyre in the Jungle Room

 

Jane floats about like a young

Priscilla at Graceland, lives

His lifestyle though her ring finger

 

is barren and the driveway

doesn’t boast a Mercedes Roadster,

nor a pink go-cart. She refuses

 

to go for the Cleopatra liner

capped with six layers of lashes.

Clarity is elusive, so she leaves

 

the falsies to Blanche’s bickering

entourage. The King wants her

here, but Jane wants to disappear

 

amidst the menagerie of monkeys

whose yellowish eyes capture all;

longs to evaporate, pull a Houdini

 

among these ghostly mascots

purchased by E’s ex-girlfriend,

the same nut-job who doled

 

cold cash for the lurid Tiki loveseat, 

the couch with dragon arms,

green shag on the floor and ceiling

 

resembling moss. Jane prays for

deliverance from coffee and chatter

when the raven-haired ring leader

 

and her high-class hags slander her

as if she were invisible—a light mist

barely occluding their vision. Best to fly

 

under the radar, comply in the corner,

head down, knitting needles in hand

before the Big E baits beautiful Blanche. 

 

 

Governess-to-Go 

Like a paramedic you’re always prepared:

SunPass, GPS, several pairs of sunglasses stowed

in the glove compartment. The trunk, a mobile office

brimming with the stock of your trade: index cards,

grammar books, charged laptop. You enter their homes

like a priest, pet their little white dogs, blend into

their storyline. You worry about the gifted sixth-grader

who vomits the week before midterms. You tutor

the whiz kid who refuses to shave a barely-there mustache;

an aspiring video game designer with Asperger’s,

he forgets to greet you at the door. You assist the Xbox

enthusiast who attempts great height with a voluminous

pompadour he teases into defying gravity. You help

the Brobdignagian slacker inhabiting a universe ill-fitted

to skyscraping adolescence, an eighth-grader always

hunching to avoid bumping his head beneath doorways.

You try reaching the one who doesn’t seem to care

about anything or anyone, drifts through days with earbuds

attached like he’s plugged into the matrix. You’re up on the dirt:

the stingy ex-husband, the mother who forced her son to write

with his right even though he’s a lefty, the girl who dozed

during SATs, the boy who seized in the crib and zips

his backpack shut after bullies spit inside, the moody

sophomore whose grades sky rocket when he starts dating—

whose abuela says he should first master keeping calzoncillos

clean. You cater to the protégé with the tiger mom who demands

you assign more homework. The kid never smiles

except when mentioning spies and favorite fictional character,

Alex Rider. You tend to the secretive soccer player

who attempts texting during sessions, her fingertips sheathed

by band-aids. You worry about each one. You have no children

of your own. Logic says don’t get attached if they offer

wallet-size senior pictures, friend you on Facebook,

or reveal tidbits the parents don’t know. They’ll move on.

They’ll struggle to remember your name several years from now.

These kids, like fashions on the red carpet, are on loan.

After golden statuettes are distributed and after-parties fizzle,

sparkly pins and pavé rings return to the vault. Gauzy and sequined

gowns are zipped and taken to the mother ship.

 

 

 

I Am Thine, Charles Thunder

is how Charlotte signs a letter for BFF Ellen Nussey. 

Slipping into disguise is second nature for C.B. in 1836,

yet there’s always a hint of truth surrounding

Brontë’s mystery men. In Greek, her name means thunder.

Charles Thunder is a suave fast-talker.

Raven hair slicked, decked in requisite

Boss or impeccable Armani,  

I imagine Mr. Thunder is actually Zeus playing

hooky among the roulette wheels and neon lights

of Vegas, a busty broad dangling from each bicep blowing

on his dice. Thunder the kind who thinks nothing

of leaning over, softly kissing a woman’s hand

and whispering, Your room or mine?

 

 

 

Catching Edward Rochester

The perfect Parisian pirouettes

for scraps of empty praise.

The women consider Adèle

 

a Frenchified fool, a firefly

somersaulting in midair.

Men in tails and top hats

 

speak in hushed tones,

muse at the charming

orphaned coquette

 

while unearthing cigars

from a box like cadavers.

They strain to observe

 

each gesture, each twist

of the small exquisite waist,

the circumference of dainty

 

wrists and fingers taking

flight. Jane feigns indifference,

thinks Adèle should stick

 

to minor comforts: Polaroids

of mama, evening prayers

to the Virgin, Pilot’s tail wagging

 

in morning greeting. Being ignored

trumps staging an impromptu ballet

turned peep show in hopes

 

of getting a pat on the back

from Thornfield’s Baby Daddy,

in hopes of catching Edward.

 

 

Letter to Edward Rochester 

—I woke in the dark after dreaming I was buried alive, and when I was awake the 

   feeling of suffocation persisted. (from Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys)

 

Despite popular opinion, I don’t hate you.

You’re not evil. Just misguided. Too much of a yes man.

Marrying for big bucks not a brilliant career move.

Haters trash talk. Friends label you a glorified gigolo,

allege you turned Bertha into a Stepford wife,

then watched in dismay as the Caribbean queen

alternated between biting her toes and uprooting

clumps of hair when she believed the Gytrash’s glowing

gaze penetrated her pores and scalp, when she swore

spirits sent secret messages—Morse code from the great

beyond disguised as a series of sneezes or twitches. 

Communing with the dead came at a high price.

Medical bills multiplied. Doctors leeched her temples.

The quack who pushed the rest cure catapulted her

into a near catatonic state. You wish you didn’t despise her. 

The woman screws anything with a pulse and refuses to floss.

She snuck into your room and set your Tempur-Pedic on fire.

You’re forever rubbing the spot where your wedding band

once resided. In dreams you lather your hand with butter,

but the ring refuses to budge, so you surrender the finger

to the saw’s merciless blade. When your eyelids flutter

open at dawn the digit remains swollen, red, intact. 

Despite the pathetic attempt at polygamy I don’t hate you.

You’re no boy scout—but you’re no Heathcliff either.

Cliff is capable of leaning over the roof and dangling

Big Bertha by the ankles just for kicks.

That SOB is likely to pop bubbly

as her skull cracks on cobblestone.         

 

 

 

 

 

Larry Narron
Letters

The director of the prison ministry

kept stressing how we weren’t

allowed to know the real names

of the pen-pals we’d been assigned

 

with the blessing of the warden.

The stranger I tried to befriend

by putting my faith in the post office

joked I should call him Azazel.

 

He warned me there were people

whose job it was to censor

my small talk, & interrogate

my anecdotes about trout fishing

 

for encrypted plans of escape.

After my fallen angel was freed,

he wanted to keep corresponding

under the condition I let him remain

 

anonymous. For more than a year,

we played chess through the mail

& I noticed the return address

change with each move he made.

 

I sank thumb tacks into six states

& wondered what woman

divorced him, what daughter

wouldn’t respond to his letters.

                       

Once, when he had me in check                  

with his bishop, he confessed

that he’d robbed a pharmacy

with a shotgun, & beaten the tech                                 

 

as she cowered under the counter.

Before his release, he told me

who his favorite ballplayers were,

but all their names were blacked out.

 

 

 

 

Tenderloin Haiku

She sleeps in the street

with a vomit-stained Bible

open to the Psalms.

 

 

 

 

 

Stan Sanvel Rubin
Dead Cat, Mass. Pike

My masterplan was always

                          to ignore whiners,

those who come to you

with their heart in their palm

                          openly expecting payment.

 

One of these is like a rash

                          around your neck,

another forces your eyes to close

with a weariness you can’t

                          sleep your way out of.

 

So explain the sudden knot of pain

                          I feel for the limp cat

flung from a passing truck,

bouncing off our windshield                   

                          like crumpled paper?

 

Poems come and go like love,

and are necessary but aren’t history,

which sweeps in long impossible waves

                          diminishing any pain,

drowning it in everyone’s pain.

 

When did I forget to be moved

                          by each small misery,

the last lungful of emptiness,

a lifetime of  uncertainties pointed with

                          one solitary breath?

 

Who did it and why remains, as most thing are,

                          a mystery.

Tomorrow­––                                                              

whether I remember this or not,

                          maybe wanting to forget

 

but dreaming of it anyway––

                          by the time I wake

the world will have ground out

another symphony of discord

                          in its opus mali.

 

 

 

 

 

David Salner
Building Site

In this dream, I’m walking beside a site

when I see through a gap in the fence

red earth slanting off toward gray dusk.

 

I know what will happen next but can’t

help catching a glimpse through the boards

of a stump, torn from the clotted earth.

 

Nothing moves, for the men have gone home

leaving shack-door open and shovels

scattered about the site. They are like toys

 

a frightened boy dropped. Nothing moves,

but through the fence I can see the stump,

upended, and the tangle of living roots

ripped from their home in the dirt.

 

 

 

 

 

Sanjeev Sethi
Peccavi

Thuribles of trust coax me to be myself.

In the calm of auroral currents, I inhale

without worry. In the noise of many

truths I choose my assailants.

 

One’s moral compass is as good as guilt

permits it. Whetted by His workbook

outcomes are unwemmed, though our

daemon’s are lame as our lapses.

 

 

 

 

Solus

Physiognomy of childhood was cat’s pyjamas

but constant changes in quick successions mottled

maps in my mind by implanting unseen wounds

metastasizing into unsigned and unspoken sequestration.

 

Aloneness by choice, I told myself or anyone

eager to apprehend. Excitations of amour?

Crosshatch of uncertainities dealt by my dearest.

Love is to abreact by anthologizing in ache.

 

 

 

 

 

D. E. Steward
Mascaron

 

For Americans there’s a Franklin and Jefferson France

 

And a Henry Adams and Henry James, and then a Henry Miller France

 

And a France of corruption, Vichy collaboration and anti-Semitism

 

And a restaurant, perfume, cashmere, Place Vendôme, Côte d’Azur France 

 

Then the haughty France that frets over the Anglo-Saxon malaise and the Eurabia realities of their internal Islam 

 

That dismisses what does not relate to itself

 

In places like the Château de Madières, the gorges and mountain ridges, in the Causse, in the sharp-edged shadows of the megaliths

 

France, always one region to the next holding the meaning of, and historical demonstration for, most human things

 

North from Béziers toward Ganges     

 

Partway, the Site Paleotologique de la Lieude on its bare argilite rouge, a stone like compressed Brunswick shale

 

Argillite, indurated sedimentary, here as mud a quarter billion years ago  

 

Dinosaur tracks left in that mud around seventy-five million years later, then sealed by volcanic debris, basalt that has been wind- and water-eroded away

 

Now high and dry in the Holocene we stare at that bare Permian stone with the toes, pads, claw marks of those upper Cretaceous reptiles cleanly embedded

 

Semi-reptilian creatures ourselves, shoed, clothed and techno-coddled, we step from our petroleum-slurping cars to stand and gape through a fence at where those leathery, wheezing creatures passed impossibly long ago

 

Sly saurian cunning

 

Whiplash movements

 

Like Komodo dragons

 

They passed here under this patch of sky, over roughly the same landscape, this place, exactly

They walked on through

 

Glancing around for enemies

 

Creatures already well along into the evolution of sapience and reflex

 

So very long ago 

 

Cicero, “Not knowing what happened before you were born means being a child forever”

 

France is replete with awarenesses 

 

Learn in a Montpeyroux vineyard that in French a brush hook is a serpe or serpette

 

Another French invention, like Champagne, the derailleur, the spinning reel, microwave transmission, the Concorde, actualization of The Rights of Man, canyoning, Brie

 

Béziers was Besera for seven centuries before the Romans took it

 

Wine, casks and corks, and an ancient August tauromanic féria

 

In the deep sunniness of Languedoc

 

The hill up into Béziers from the river, the Orb and the Canal du Midi, across the Plateau des Poètes, up the Allées Paul-Riquet

 

Pierre-Paul de Riquet built the Canal du Midi in fifteen late-seventeenth century years

 

Without employ of what would be expected to have been corvée royale

 

He paid workers on the huge project more than they could have earned anywhere else, and holidays, Sundays and weather days off, sick days covered 

 

More like Pierre-Paul de Riquet, perhaps no Revolution a hundred years down the line   

 

He was born in Béziers, 1604, died partway to the Atlantic in Toulouse, 1680, a year before his Canal du Midi was done

 

Béziers to Aquitaine, and stepped back down to sea level in Bordeaux

 

The most extensive designed landscape of its time

 

Hand labor to construct those locks, graded watersheds, tunnels and aqueducts

 

The Sun King and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the finance behind it, could well have traveled to the Midi for the opening

 

France exuding history of its history

 

In Béziers above the Orb, houses on Rue St-Jacques have walls that were part of the Roman arena

 

The Ancien cathédrale St-Nazaire is on the river bluff where Simon de Montfort’s crusaders butchered twenty thousand Cathars and their Béziers citizen Catholic compatriots in 1209 

 

Back from Damascus and the Fourth Crusade, Montfort with hyper-righteous vengeance murdered Cathars for their contra-Catholic practices

 

And then burned Béziers before moving on to put siege to Carcassonne

 

“Kill them all; God will know his own”

 

Now, as nearly everything in Languedoc Roussillon, Béziers is at the same time canny and expansive in its welcomings

 

As from a chic maîtrise d’hotel from Alicante serving a fine repertoire classique côté cuisine in the cream-yellow glow of Le Framboisier on rue Boïeldieu

 

After days of trekking on the Chemin St-Jacques

 

Toned and tired 

 

And euphoric at being in Béziers, dead-center of the Biterrois franchophone zone of rugby and corridas

 

Close to Barcelona with Narbonne and Perpignan between ­   

 

These cities from Languedoc’s deep reservoir of history with a particular urban-Iberian-open-vista quality, high-point-to-high-point, streets ramping directly up the mild urban hills in rational Roman clarity   

Off from Béziers and the Site Paleotologique de la Lieude’s vivid dinosaur tracks to drive into the high country of the Causses, a limestone plateau, a rocky, brushy, near-waste with outcroppings, gorse and broom

 

Garrigue

 

Ash, alder, holm oak, goat willow, strawberry tree, suckering elms, spindle tree, elder, and white poplar together in a rich limestone scrub with tangles of wild hops, dog-roses, bramble, old man’s beard and white bryony 

 

To les Lavagnes on D122’s switchbacks across the eastern slope of Mont St-Baudille, a Neolithic camp that a thousand years after the Romans was a Cathar mountain settlement

 

A refuge of a mas or two through the centuries of religious wars and revolution 

 

Otherwise les Lavagnes was before probably just a summer cheese farm approachable only on horse or mule or on foot 

 

A Resistance locale in the early nineteen forties 

 

Now a dolmen and a few menhirs on the lonely plateau

A wide place on a very quiet, narrow road

 

A picnic site for Sunday jaunts

 

No Roman or Burgundian doom looms now, no hunger, no mud, no pikemen or archers or prying Vichy collaborators, no dread, no anxiety

 

Only people socializing with no challenges for them other than to get back in their cars and drive home

 

The first humans probably arrived in the Causses when the Pyrenees were still a gargantuan glacial mass like the Ice Age glaciers of the Alps

 

Twenty thousand years ago Mas d’Azil’s blue ice tunnels drained away the melt as a viable climate returned

 

Mas d’Azil was a wintering meeting place for eons

 

Its human debris troweled and brushed clean in the late nineteenth century proved a clear linkage of the Paleolithic with the Neolithic

 

From the end of the era of Paleolithic cave painting, mysterious color-daubed river pebbles, some with a single black or red daub, others with two or three, some striped, turned up there 

 

With flint knives, firestones, even sinew-sewn skins

 

Domestication of sheep and goats in the Causses began at least nine thousand years ago

 

Then cattle, pigs, grain cultivation

 

Now nothing but the rough, empty, brushy hills and the narrow road 

Into the Gorges de la Vis

Toward Ganges, and then the route to Nîmes

 

Ganges, in the Cévennes on the way to the Rhône, the Roman Aganticum, modern population thirty-five hundred

 

White plastic café chairs kicked back on the particular organic grubbiness of marketplace asphalt by the far descendants of the Magdalenians who carved horn tools and chipped flints in the Vallée de l’Hérault

 

People here who zoom around in their fast little cars and with their plasma screen app-happy electronics enjoy the civility of the consumer’s thirty-five-hour workweek

 

In our twenty-first-century home, not all that long after the ice and the flattest irony is that we can’t know if the ice is retreating, advancing, or even that anything is truly changing

 

With our time window relatively no longer than a dog’s

 

And then of course we have yet to figure out what their small paint-daubed Mesolithic stones at Mas d’Azil were all about

 

Two skinny boys perched on a wall near their father, their mother sitting in a café chair nearby, except for their incoherent modern mien look a great deal like Picasso’s Family of Saltimbanques

 

Smutchy and worn, shrunk-wrinkled, generally garish colors and accidental, mostly corporate logos and motifs

 

Red and black sateen Chicago Bulls jacket on the father, one of the kids with a filthy Hard Rock Cafe Tulsa T-shirt

 

Faces of the France that has always been, that was Gaul

 

And before Gaul an iron culture coming from the Bronze Age, out of the Neolithic

 

Whose stone polishers and pot makers looked like, and reasoned, and were as complicated as we are now

 

The same mascaron faces here as after the suppression of the Cathars

 

With the Hundred Years War sputtering on far to the north

 

When with artillery coming into use, the châteaux of Languedoc were no longer aristocratic strategic strongholds

 

They became picturesque, stray, near-derelict perches like the fourteenth-century Chateau de Madières at the mouth of the Gorges de la Vis 

 

And all of Languedoc Roussillon stands there still in nearly immutable igneous stone

 

 

 

 

 

Millie Tullis
Violence is a light gray matter

Something:

your bed frame kicking the wall

(we were two anxious cats)

                                                moaning and thumping

                                                                                    without thought

wail for something that still

doesn’t feed

            enough

 

Check me

one more time

pleaseopen my mouth, finger each molar

push gums back until we discover bone to take

feel (your)self breaking through, scratching tip’s

core.

 

Fuck me as proof—

                                    see, how hollow I can make it

every motion, limbstretchingfibers

can be scraped out clean with a cotton t-shirt, folded incorrectly,     a pink toothbrush.

You went in

to my body to beat

something out of

yourself.

 

            (And you never said “Love”

anyway.

You

said “fucking”

                        a lot.

                        Turn up the side of your mouth,

                                                                        offer me half

your cantaloupe smile, like you do me

so many favors.)

 

I don’t know what you found

in me:

                        slip small papers

                        sealed, in the drawer

                        by the bed. Notebooks full

                        but hidden rashes

                        beneath condoms

                        ready-made

 

Being alone with my skin against all windows

leaves me with:

 

You making love to me

was a beating:

 

scratched on the back

of waitress pad in blue.

 

 

 

 

Suzette

 

wears sunglasses inside

the restaurant. She pulls

long fingers                 long, satin pink acrylic

to her mouth,   clicking up her lips, like ten ants

rhythmically    pulls herself to my

wrist in a         circle of

respiration,      soft-skin-reaching.

 

They asked for my table         (Suzette and Dennis)

ordered a club (white bread)

             a monte cristo (with fries)     

 

Each time I pass, Suzette asks for more coffee,

but in the reaching out her      hands way,

sometimes

            she gets around my arm and smiles.

She is eighty at least, but skinny and              sexy

            sounds like the Eva Gabor,     they are fat

moviestar glasses.

 

Dennis leaves the table

Suzette says she can’t leave him         (he’s so much younger than her; cross-eyed and bald)

when her second husband died

                                                but she misses her children.

She’s a mother, she loves her children.

                                                            (she is whispering just above the breath,

                                                            there is the click of teeth,

                                                            mouth opening and closing, louder

                                                            than her secrets)

 

he won’t let her see her children. My chirrdren.

 

they are afraid to call her

                                    anymore.

 

Dennis returns from having paid

their sandwich bill. He leaves the table,

she will follow.

 

She touches me

ignores ketchup and ice cream lacing my arms, my apron:

 

Can I give you a hug, Millie?

Oh, god, I just love you.

You would like my daughter,

she’s fifty now, and remarried in L.A….

but I don’t know who shhe…

She is

such a good gurl, like you,

hon

            ey.

 

 

 

 

 

James Valvis
Inscription

Inside my paperback copy
of Gaylord Brewer’s book “Devilfish”
lies an inscription by the author
to a guy known only as Bob:
“Do not believe the arguments of demons,
even when they speak the truth.”
I wonder about the wisdom of this maxim,
but what bugs me more about the book
for these years I’ve owned it
is Bob decided to sell this treasure.
(It’s a terrific book of poetry.)
And Bob is far from alone in doing this.
I own dozens of books inscribed to others,
by the author or the person giving the book.
I have a leather-bound Roman Missal
given to a 12-year-old on her Confirmation.
I own a journal of a dying woman
that was presented to her son.
I find these gems online, at used book stores.
I wonder how the original owners parted with them.
When I receive such a book, it’s a blood bond.
I save letters, birthday cards, poetry acceptances.
You could no more make me sell an inscribed book
than junk the crucifix my grandmother willed me,
burn the drawings my daughter penned for me.
But for people like Bob it’s different.
In my mind he’s on his seventh marriage,
his thirteenth religious conversion.
I imagine Bob travels from state to state,
takes one transient job after another.
He never chose a political party.
His favorite meal is whatever’s on special.
Poor Bob.  Poor footloose Bob.
He’s always on his way to the next thing,
chased by demons like me with truths like this.
Not that he believes us.

 

 

 

 

 

Laryssa Wirstiuk
Final Meals

I’m wondering about death-row inmates

who weren’t asked what they’d like to eat

 

and why I’m dreaming up my final meal

as if eating for the end is more fantasy

 

than need. But wait: what if no one takes

my order? Order can be an arrangement

 

or a command. And what higher-order

functions will I most miss when impending

 

consequence finally does realize itself?

Will I refuse the offer? “I’m still full,”

 

I’ll say, stuffed to the gills from listening

to desires: double cheeseburgers and fries,

 

ice cream, BLT sandwiches, and cherry pies.

I’m not surprised by fast food for quick

 

endings to a spanning life of decisions

and circumstances presented. You’re given

 

a birthday cake because no one’s ever

celebrated you with candles and layers.

 

Blow again. Exhale with force and rebound

the breath. And you - why would the blood-

 

thirsty deny a plate of animals as food?

I’ll pick at your dish but would prefer

 

the things I never allow myself: deep-

fried crisps, milkshakes, whole pizzas.

 

I hope the cook can fashion my requests.

I worry about regional variations: I’d prefer      

 

Neapolitan made with Manhattan tap water

over a Chicago-style deep-dish crust

 

but would not refuse a cheesy Ellio’s square

microwaved on a Friday evening in a mess

 

hall, where we’d sometimes sing to a summer

baby over oatmeal creme sandwich cookies.

 

You, who requested liquid lunch: did you expect

them to bring you vintage Dom Perignon?

 

I won’t describe the effort it took to recycle

the olive-green bottle and how tired I am,

 

too exhausted even to eat. Will my hunger

wake my departed body? Is the denial

 

a strategy? How can death overwhelm

if the stomach’s rumbling, if I’m hungry?

 

While my low roll opens the earth, full

bellies anchor the sated. They’ll stay.  

 

 

 

 

Both Waving and Drowning*

When I wave, I only ever mean

“goodbye.” I wave at inappropriate

times: once when I was drowning,

by habit when I enter a new room,

and always when I’m tearing

a grayscale page from the calendar:

the twenty-second of September.

My bracelets cackle when I maneuver

my wrists. Palm and prints are yours

to read. My wave isn’t launching

movements. My wave is a failure

of words. My wave is waving

above a crest. It wants to master

other gestures for its repertoire:

a smile and wink from Tiffani Amber.

My wave is limited by limbs and nature.

It’s studying a video tutorial titled

“How to Wink Like a Korean Model”

and instructing me to turn one cheek

then gently close, not squeeze,

the opposite eye. My jaw should shift

forward. Have the lifeguards acquiesced?

I want nothing more than for them to melt.

And one more thing: I’d like to pretend

that my wave might mean “hello,”

that I can still pronounce vowels.

You think this is cute? You should feel

how wet I am. My lungs are filling

with what tastes like saline solution.

The liquid is more than a problem

I use to coat my lashes for charming.

From driftwood I fashion an artificial arm,

which I’ll use for practice with a hand saw.

I’ll build my courage using repetitive

movements and weight-bearing lifts

for not only salutations but also greetings:

less bye-bye and more nice to meet you.

 

Title is reference to poem “Not Waving but Drowning” by Stevie Smith

 

 

 

 

 

 

Mark Young

The Three Chambered Heart

Even if it was as the

specialists suggest, that

in certain intensities of

light the interplay of

particular patterns might

strobe & cause him to

black out, he would

rather pass on the

 

surgery than pass up

the opportunity to see

salamanders come

down to the world's

edge & drink up the

blood of the setting sun.

 

 

 

 

Natural selection

 

1.

In any given time, a proportion

of the molecules should be fast

enough to escape into the

surrounding space station. There

the atmosphere is generated by

naked mole rats. If it falls too far

they will sell off the currency. Not

a nil outcome. More like loss/loss.

 

2.

It was the ambivalence

not the ambience that he

came here for. Not the

sensation that surrounded

him but the sense of what

it did inside. Transition.

Decisions. Going in. Coming

out. Inflation is rampant.

 

3.

Nobody is giving out prizes for

getting the answer wrong. Some-

times a tree breaks out into a short

series of dance steps that coincide

exactly with the clicks the earth

makes as it cools. Nobody is getting

younger despite the tuck-lines. Every-

body thinks they're Fred Astaire.

 

4.

The Mardi Gras Indians arrive at

irregular intervals, offering to buy

the Galapagos Islands with the

beads & feather boas they have

in plenty. But no-one goes for it. Pink

is out this season, organic goods are

in. Plus, the only music they have

available for download is rubbish.

 

5.

The workers do not usually

reproduce. Game theory,

like horn length, is dependant

upon the efficacy of illegal

telephone taps. Despite some

purported continuity, only

an irrigated colon embraces

the body of its predecessor.

 

6.

This is about me. If you

appear it is oversight, an

errant imagining easily fixed

by a simple find & replace

command, where you are the

one replaced & I am found

to be the product of someone

else's erratic imagination.