Molly Tamarkin
The Best Sex I Ever Had
was in Amsterdam, naturally
at an impossibly hip hotel a friend assured me I would love
where vintage bicycles bedecked each floor by the stairwell
where the heating system sucked me dry each night like a vampire
where a grim little breakfast was delivered in a brown paper bag each morning
where I was headed after an exhausting day, walking in the rain, listening to my friend who
knew I’d love the hotel tell me he moved out of my house because he hated living
with me so much, but it was probably temporary
where when I entered the lobby-cum-bar-cum-café-cum-crafts space I was engulfed by a
swarm of hipsters playing intellectual games or creating art or wearing scarves and I
asked for a menu and the server looked me up and down and suggested room service
where I walked away and saw
a table in a corner behind a pillar closer to the bar
I grabbed it
waylaid a waiter
ordered a drink: martini, up, olives
and prepared to wait forever
but it came so fast!
Someone put it in front of me
and I lifted it up
and sipped a sip
a sip, magnificent
(and closed my eyes and felt the click in the back of my head).
Suddenly
I felt someone looking at me
I opened my eyes and met the bartender’s eyes
he was watching me
and I nodded my appreciation
Rick Adang
Thanksgiving in Estonia
I came here looking for a land
where they don’t eat their gods.
Or the US just never impressed me much
and never seemed that impressed with me.
Besides Catholics, most Americans
don’t eat their gods, but do spend
a lot of time fattening them up.
Thanksgiving? No thanks.
Leave those brainless birds in peace.
This little land would never worship the turkey
eats its share I suppose
but wouldn’t think of laying it out
with candles on an altar
for the family to gather reverently around.
Outside Cheyenne
West in a Chevy station wagon
between Burma Shave signs
(Her chariot / Raced 80 per /
They hauled away / What had / Ben Her)
Dad leads us in his favorite recruiting song: They took
the blue from the skies and a pretty girl’s eyes
and a touch of Old Glory too, and gave it to the men
who proudly wear the U. S. Air Force blue.
Mom riding shotgun provides the harmony
Dad’s hands always at 10 and 2, eyes glued to the highway.
In a whirlwind of candy wrappers and Old Maid cards
the kids bounce and bellow in the backseat
from time to time pausing to decode
the hieroglyphs on the back of his neck.
Spring Cornucopia
In each corner of my house
other worlds evolving,
objects eluding
trips to the dump.
Glass gewgaws
grown fierce absorbing
the bits of light
reflecting off other objects
dented, decomposing,
coalescing into primitive essence.
Carcass ballet
dust ball break dance
skin cell repository
abandoned words:
cantankerous, hornswoggle, bilious, hooliganism.
Mouse turds and somewhere mice
trapped, poisoned or vicious half-starved.
Photo albums with broken bindings
sepia-toned strangers I call family
and purer versions of myself.
Ryan McCarty
A Tax on the Poor and Stupid
When I opened my hood
to find four dried turdlets
on my engine block, I knew
a smallish thing survived
the night sleeping huddled
against the dissipating heat
of yesterday’s hard drive.
I topped off the leaking oil.
Every cold glug was a prayer
for my neighbor who slept under
icy clouds of breath behind every
job site he worked, in every empty
conversion van stalled out
on the dead-end off the block.
After coughing for a season, his snore
erupted into a hemorrhage
they found him frozen to
after the long holiday weekend.
Like my brother, he used to mock me
for every lotto ticket I’d pick
up when the billionth place
lit up on the blood red sign
over the liquor store he’d hustle
empties to for a few bucks.
If I had all that money, I’d make it
so you’d stop keeping me up
at night, dying on the streets,
I’d say. I’m drowning
like every penny plopped
in the library fountain, partner,
he’d reply. Wishes float
heads-down and rest right
where I can’t quite reach
unless I’m willing to wet
my sleeve. Why’d I ever argue
with a man who needed to drip
through early December, snatching
up handfuls of derelict dreams,
barely enough to buy a burger?
And now what kind of heat
will my two balled up bills put off?
When I give in and light them on fire
instead, will the glow of matter turning
back to energy do to this dark world
what my foolish hopes never could?
What We Can Learn at A Funeral
If it’s one of those split family kinds, a cable news
collapse, a congregation on the lip of winter
right as we all wedge a heavy door snake underneath
our hearts to slow the seeping cold, that’s when
we might notice: if we want our backs to the wind,
we’ll all have to face the same direction.
When pulling blankets drenched in stale smoke
from a house that used to be an old woman’s,
we can agree there is a sadness only fire can clean.
We can wish the black clouds happy passage
into a sky we hope is hearty enough to choke
down the damage we do. We can each throw open
one window, kill the thermostat, and walk away,
waiting for the chill to take each yellow spirit
by the arm and walk them out behind the barn
and then on, and on. And even those of us
who own no barns can know the calm of watching
an old dog gone to lay down in the last sun
this body will ever know. We can eat pie,
praising the hands that pressed the crust, poured
the cups full of coffee more hot than strong.
We can tell a pregnant cousin she’s growing
new life that will lift more than one mourner
into springtime. We can watch her husband walk
on the earth more delicately. And when it’s over
we can each drive off. We don’t have to agree how
many hands Jesus might have on the wheel, but we can
be sure of our instincts, that at the first hard glare
of brake lights ahead, all our arms will reach
to brace whoever is sitting by our sides,
as if we aren’t all about to go flying together.
To the Last Assumptions Catching Fire
“Assuming the worst in others, we show our worst character.”
~ Judge Timothy R. Walmsley, sentencing the murderers of Ahmaud Arbery
Just north off the highway, I was burning
the leaves and amaranth stalks
of a first good year when the Arbery verdict
came in. I held a hatchet
in my white hand. I scanned the line
of yards, the whistle of logs
screaming like a truckload of hate. My neighbor,
I could only imagine her sniffing
at the back door, knowing me, and scared
by my fire today none
the less. So I’ll clear her walkway when the cold
comes, and always reply to her blessings
from a distance with loud amens. I will
speak softly and offer fruit to the sons of her grandsons
Sunday morning when they stay. I’ll pray
the revolution is like this one log, a “tree of heaven,”
another invasive species left piled at the fenceline
by the power company when they stripped
all our trees bare and left blackouts still blooming
all summer. May it burn the redlines,
harden the sticks strong hands wedged under
negligence to shim the wobble.
May its ashes fertilize. May its smoke blow respectfully
straight, away from her windows. May
her great-niece look into these orange swirls
and find words to fill the loops
of melody she’s hummed since spring, walking
with my daughter like great cats
along our shared chain link fence. May their bodies
grow heavy enough to bend
the old aluminum poles. May the boundaries
break like heaven dropped
a tree down on the last assumption: what I grow
is mine, what you grow is yours.
Andrey Gritsman
Military Parade
At 6 a.m. I wake up to the sound of military trumpets,
puffing frozen air, spitting rusty tobacco-stained saliva.
It’s always November 7 or a May Day holiday.
Internal Ministry troops regiment in their blue shoulder straps
warm up, bristle clean, prepared to march right after the paratroopers
down to the Moscow Red Square. Their ominous buses line up
along our stone-facaded street, engines running, staying warm for the officers.
The men get a quick smoke, taking two-three puffs, that’s all,
just in case the order to move comes early. Wide cheekboned peasant faces
are red, eyes attentive, they are the best of the draft, looking after
our precious heritage. I can’t sleep, my eyes glued to the soldiers
through the double framed window of our communal apartment,
Onegin book is on my bed:
“his beaver collar shines with silver all covered with a frozen dust…” *
*A quote from Alexander Pushkin’s novel in verse, Eugene Onegin
David Salner
Weinberg’s Trumpet Challenge—September 1939, as the Nazis
invade Poland—
The tango everyone likes, Milonga—
they’re playing it on the radio,
when a voice cuts in, “If you’re a Jew,
leave Warsaw.” But why and how?
So the Weinbergs, Mr. and Mrs.,
dither in their kitchen, and finally
push young Mieczysław out the door
with little sister, go! they say,
however long it takes to cross the border.
He pulls, but little sister’s feet are hurting.
She won’t go on, tugs like a stubborn calf,
now breaking free, a calf returning home.
At that moment, could they, could anyone
have known of projects soon to come,
mach’ schnel! in forests near Treblinka,
crossroads a little west of Krakow,
boomtowns with barrack, furnace, chimney—
who could see it through the mists
of time, the fate of nations, of families,
of a little sister with sore feet?
But in that autumn, maybe for Mieczysław
a whiff of it, an icy breeze, a tightening
in his lungs. And so for days he whips his muscles,
naps in ditches when he can’t go on,
wakes roadside in hoarfrost, marches again,
and learns how easy, even for a gifted son,
to want the peace of death, to want it
as arrestment to the torment of the march.
That’s when, on the highway before him,
a German soldier leaves his motorcycle
to ask directions of three Jews—the garments
alone would tell him they were Jews—
which they provide, with bows, with careful detail.
Danke schon, the soldier smiles, remounts,
kicks the pedal, tosses back a hand grenade
for thanks. All this young Weinberg sees,
a soldier driving off, three Jews torn to shreds,
their garments, their careful detail. After that,
it wells up from burnt-out nerves, a music,
if he could live he would compose, a placement
on the road of notes, one foot then another.
From tattered thoughts he summons up
an orchestra and tells them, come, take up
your instruments, tap tap, the trumpets will begin.
Under his arm, the family photo album—
all that’s left of parents, sister who ran back—
and with no herald but the notes,
he walks across the border into Belarus.
Carolyn Steinhoff
In Line for Love
“Mushrooms come up in the same spot
In the abandoned clearing”
–Kenneth Rexroth
I perform my rites
—work, pay rent—
to buy mercy from the invisible
owner of souls. The story’s so old
—how suffering will pass over the obedient—
the ones wearing the red letter of age
can tell it by heart.
Ken Pobo
Coming Out to an Owl
A talkative barred owl
asks who cooks for you.
Usually my husband does—
he cooks better than I do.
When I ask the owl why
he wants to know, he goes
silent. I tell him
I met my husband
through a gay newspaper.
33 years ago. The owl
flies away. Rumor has it
that he meets the moon
in secret. They cook together
and eat well, parting
by morning. A discreet sun
winks and leaves them be.
Mary Dean Lee
Between the shining sun and thunder—
is a crawl space to an attic with tall rafters.
My neck bends and twists to get through
belly scraping against the dust and grit, pig hair
picking up spiders hitchhiking. I push myself,
again. Have others been here before me?
Maybe someone more agile, limber, able to
slither more quickly past the buttresses,
the arches to open space, sunlight.
I feel seasick, like when we went on a boat
off Grand Manan before sunrise to catch the
right tide and visit the puffins on Machias Seal
Island. It was summer and we had our winter
vests on. Halfway there, the boat loses its
balance riding the extremes. David is green
tries the one washroom on board but it’s locked.
As I reach to hand him a bag for vomiting,
I lean over the side and let loose, he is mortified,
then the door opens and he disappears rest of the trip.
The soft light at sundown filtering through the
fall leaves, I am close to spilling, my heart racing.
If you knocked on my door, right now, I would ask
you to sweep me over the top, help me explode into
the seawall, screaming: Place your hand gently
between my legs, or grab me by the buttocks and pull
me hard against you. No one ever plucked my
spinning ball at its peak. I want it now.
Michael Hettich
In the Dream of a Bear
1.
We barely pause in our conversation
when a red-tailed hawk tumbles through the hemlock,
lands with a thump and a bluster of feathers
then leaps to its feet and flies off.
We don’t run to the clearing to watch him disappear
into the sky, or even wonder
what made him fall. We don’t scour the ground
where he landed to see what he might have left behind.
We have other things on our minds.
And when the mother bear saunters through our back yard,
followed by two cubs running awkwardly behind her,
then pauses to wait for a third, we watch them
as though we were watching Wild Kingdom on TV.
When coyotes wake me in the middle of the night,
these days, I rarely go outside to listen.
Instead I go over what I have to do tomorrow
and try to fall back to sleep. And then
I dream coyotes and hawks, bears
circling our house, peering in...
2.
Yesterday, driving to the store for a bottle
of wine, I hit a squirrel. Of course
I tried to miss it; in fact my swerving
to miss might have caused it to slip
under my tire. I saw it thrashing in my rear-view,
and then I bought my wine. When I drove home it was gone
or flattened so thoroughly I couldn’t see it, driving by.
The wine was delicious. I sat on my porch
sipping it like nectar while the last hummingbirds
of the season buzzed at the feeder. Soon
they’ll be flying to forests a thousand miles away.
I could hear the highway in the distance, humming
like a faint reminder of something I didn’t
want to think about. It was louder than usual.
The music on my phone couldn’t cancel it out.
When the breeze shifted slightly, the sound of the highway
blew off into silence and I sat with myself
for a while, wondering what the bears
and coyotes in the woods around our house
might dream, lying there in the darkness.
Then I thought of myself in the dream of a bear
and wondered what I’d look like there.
Somehow this thought made me happy.
Frederick Pollack
Ingredient
I don’t know who’s ultimately paying me.
The company itself, the other companies
that package, distribute, advertise,
are dandruff, distant disposable moons
of an office somewhere whose only product
is money, and three or four men
whose names would mean nothing, one of whom had
an idle thought that resulted in my
being paid. It was that intellectuals,
sophisticates – he used in his mind, no doubt,
a nastier word, or just a bar on a chart –
also consume. And he knew (our lives are transparent)
that I consume, often and eagerly,
VOORMAN’S SUGAR-FREE VANILLA WAFERS,
130 calories in three.
The taste and crunch of the dough are like those,
I suspect, of communion wafers, but when
the filling reaches sweetness receptors
it’s a mouthgasm! When I meet, therefore,
with fellow-elitist
friends, unobtrusively, almost
subliminally I work in praise
of VOORMAN’S SUGAR-FREE VANILLA WAFERS.
It isn’t difficult; for we, too, often
engage in the smallest of small talk (Schopenhauer’s
“evidence of the teeth and the bowels”). I’ve even
evoked judicious laughter
comparing them to the Sugar-Free Chocolate
variant, which are less a Platonic Form.
The contract allows me to do this, and even
to spill the beans, which I did when a beautiful,
accomplished full professor asked
how I lived on an adjunct’s wages. I wonder if
the conglomerate steered my circle toward me
or me to them, and if in fact I was bred
for the job. She looked distressed when,
with artful trailings-off and a distant expression,
I speculated thus. On the other hand,
I said, it’s really a good cookie,
and I need the money.
Paul Nelson
Dill's Saw Mill
The belt driven blade
bigger than a Viking shield
keens through thick logs lengthwise
cedar spruce oak and white pine
singing through winter and spring
slabs dropping off sideways
still wet and limber as drunks
down the rollers to be stacked
shimmed outside in summer sun
breeze that sighs through
sobered straight
not warped from drying too fast
sawdust mounding beneath the track
to be shoveled like manure
for the pellet factory.
The operatic soprano of the blade
ecstatic, begetting lumber.
Dill takes a break to smoke outside
in the chill air above the bay
a dry, hard, half deaf man
his jacket armpits stained.
In the kitchen spooning tomato soup
chewing lard smeared anadama bread,
sprinkled with sugar, Dill is pretty much
heedless of Mary’s patter about their two boys,
off to the Legion bar, back from “tours,”
discharged, who never came “home”
as squat Mary knows
except to visit quickly
on monumental Harleys
who will dig into her “special” meal
steamed clams to dip in clarified
butter with lobster meat
plattered on the plank table
sons who bring no wives or children
who wince with pride at their father’s
canticle of steel shrilling Dill Hill’s
white birch and poplar trees, the gray,
mustered stacks on the tonsured field.
With My Brother's Son
on the greening field, as if I were my own father,
we walk at dusk in his seventh year. He loves the
the fawn the dog misses, lying flat in last year’s hay
that, as we pass, bolts for the fence and sails with precision
through the center mesh, the doe waiting in the woods,
the boy delighted and I think how last year’s sheep,
gleaming packages in the freezer were slavish to the fence,
a pan of grain, my knife, the field tanning.
They came to the knife slobbering for frost-glazed apples,
the boy from a small town dawdling with daylight
settling into dusk while he bobbles a neon tennis ball,
a tiny moon, and I tell him how his father, my kid brother,
would stay in the barn feeding the animals apples. His dog
ate his toast and the goat loved yellow, green and red peels
of wild apples and zucchini, and kissed him with its nose
but backed away from the Lucky that would also bother the
cumbersome Jersey squirting gallons a day, that crooned
when he’d massage her udder and teats working down
“pencils” of calcium. Lung cancer killed him, leaving
the boy.
Images I fashion, being firstborn, say, of working
out on the flat earth I intended to travel the rest of my life
shooting hoops beneath the security light: lay-ups, jumpers,
hooks and foul shots until our mother’s yell swelled
like the last ball clanging off the metal backboard
like a Buddhist gong and bouncing back to me, rolling into
my hands to dribble back to the kitchen knowing
my kid brother would be a little late to come in, stopping
on the porch for one last smoke, just sixteen,
me off to see the world of my dreams. Now I
tell this boy to run ahead to the kitchen, to say
I’ll be along.
Claire Scott
Tell Mefor my son
tell me how tell me how to make you better tell me
how to make anything better in this shambolic world
with stone-heavy days and insomnia nights so easy
to give up so easy to give up hours of care of love
so easy to turn aside to take to drink to talk defeat
as if no point as if no hope as if dark angels will prevail
is to abandon the child of my body
is to surrender to the past
only yes to yet another doctor yes to yet another pill
in an endless parade of pills yes to pointless prayers
past all possibility the gods gone ago
yes and yes and yes to miracles
when no miracles are left
John Repp
Another Poem Composed Under the Influence of Dean Young…It hurts getting out of an egg,/hurts having the same light inside
your liver/as a hyena…
“A Student Comes to My Office”
When this particular student comes to my office, she eye-smiles,
marvels at foot-tall Larry Bird launching a three & says she pays
for everything via two awful jobs & four wee scholarships & Dr. X
was so cruel yesterday she sobbed for two hours in the stairwell
though Dr. Q (who, like her, reads Max Weber just for fun)
really listened after he unpacked his own duffel of woe, so no more
were they alone in their humiliating but now mutually consoling
incomprehension of Plato—not all of Plato (he’s not that hard),
just the really confusing stuff Dr. X put on the test & will I,
as her new advisor (M mostly has no clue but swears I’m cool),
tell the dean to waive these five gen. ed. courses so she can go
from two jobs to one next term & get out before the stupidity
kills her but even more because she’s not only researched me,
but also wants to be me—not literally, of course (she wants
a Ph.D.)—so I laugh because laughter’s argon, reason neon,
so for self-evidently no reason, I laugh, then she emotes
for another twenty-one minutes as I visualize Dick Allen’s
home-run trot, muse how six amphorae of Cretan olive oil
evokes a tidal heat I’ll never know, gaze at the miniature
Forbes Field perched alongside the “Bob” Clemente card
& swerve to Larry Legend’s Da Vinci passing & flat-footed,
broken-fingered jump shots as forms at last get flourished,
tears slide (she just knows I’ll help), so I smile sympathetically,
sign a single waiver, gently recount how an advisor’s sway
barely exists & note with a wizened twinkle that being me
isn’t the gladsome banquet she seems to think & not an hour
after she shoulders her buttery leather backpack & blushingly
wishes me good evening, an email bloops onto my screen
(how did I get here from Olivetti heaven?) that unfurls
scroll upon scroll of disappointment—no, shock, humiliation,
utterly justified rage & her parents’ & friends’ raging disbelief
that I’d laugh—laugh! I! Who isn’t even a Ph.D.!—at the dreams
that despite Dr. X’s cruelty & my contempt she’ll make real
at maybe not even Oxford but the Sorbonne where her teachers
always said she’d land, so I step to the rattling fridge my wife
saved from her dorm days, retrieve the sardines & apple juice,
shut the casement, note the splinter of sunset, jot on a sticky note
the time already reserved for the come-to-Jesus meeting with the dean
AND my mother, crack the juice, split a sleeve of saltines, marvel how
the slippery, smoky fish conjure untranslatable reveries,
then cue up season three, episode four of Combat! after which
I’ll head home to that taffy-pull of confusion & revelation.
Elisa Mishto
Ships Porn on YouTube
I spend the whole Christmas compulsively watching clips on YouTube of enormous ships adrift.
The algorithm showed me a clip of a cargo ship in a storm once, and I fell into a rabbit hole. I’d
watch anything featuring big ships crashing in slow motion against the edges of ports, struggling
among waves as high as six-story houses, or breaking in two. At first, I watch only short clips
from security cameras, with no sound or color. But after a while, I’ve seen them all, and I start
searching the internet for any kind of material about incidents involving ships. I find out there’s a
whole subgenre of nautical catastrophe movies: reportages, true crime stories, cheap reenactment
series. When I exhaust those, I move on to airplane catastrophes, then to chairlifts, gondola lifts,
elevators. But I still prefer the ship disasters to anything else.
I tell him about this new obsession. He calls it “ship porn,” but I don’t think that’s accurate. It’s
not why they sank that hooked me—it’s the act of sinking itself. The water ferociously pouring
into the middle of the metal carcass, inevitably dragging everything down, with me inside. The
pleasure they give isn’t directly sexual. It’s more like meeting a person and experiencing a déjà
vu of sex with them—while, in fact, you never did, not even in your fantasies. Yet it feels so real.
“Bleak,” he says, before politely ignoring me for the rest of the day.
Sheila E. Murphy
Gladstone
Maybe I feel safe enough to say Gladstone.
Bright shining stone, north of Escanaba
where I walked the shore of the Great Lake,
heard gray jay, black-backed woodpecker, common loon,
and watched myself disappear from view.
I croon beyond those days. I read. I walk
beside the perfect lake. Spring here.
Another year. Black-capped Chickadee.
Snowy owl. Next week I’ll reach a milestone age
here in the desert. Take my chances at
another youth. Visit the arboretum
of agave, succulents, eucalypti.
Behave as the birds behave. Listen
to the earth endure the film of wind.
Speak toward moisture beneath the shade,
remember rhyming rush of the Lake.
Tony Beyer
Noun frequency
when we were young
we wrote our names
in light on dark air
with bonfire-night sparklers
signs even briefer
than the characters drawn
by water calligraphers
on sunlit pavements
poems sometimes
or even more daringly
the incandescent name
of someone we loved
Deep spaces
descendants of the ponies
that used to work in the mines
gaze out from behind their fence
at the open cast’s wide
unconcealed and uncompromising
black wound in the ground
how the enormous machines
in operation are still referred to
in terms of horse power
is a compliment to them
after millennia of harnessed labour
brought about their redundancy
among their forbears some
never saw the surface again
while others became blind
dependent on the men beside them
wiry and harsh-breathing
fellow inhabitants of the dark
Priscilla Atkins
Bowerman’s Berries
Relishing the season’s first strawberry smoothie’s
perfect dome lid capping an airy wig of whipped
cream, the extra-wide hole, the barber pole
sunk in the carnival ride of cream and smashed
fruit, my mind leaps to another sweet: a year ago
July, washed/ dried, three of these vessels served
as aides-de-camp in the surreptitious transport
of the last of my father’s ashes five hours south
to Urbana. First choice for dispersal: pine-filled
Illini Grove, part of Dad’s ritual walk to and from
his chemistry lab. But the intersection feels too open
to view (I might be arrested for littering). Second up:
St. Mary’s Road, the round barns and hilly curves,
where, furrowed with science-y thoughts, Dad strolled
each noon. Alas, St. Mary’s is under tar and smoke
and beeping trucks. Third: the President’s Japanese
gardens (just ‘cause), where I significantly pause
until a police cruiser ambles by. In my mind’s mirror,
Dad frowns. His express request: “dumped in the trash.”
(No post-mortem fancy stuff.) Panic setting in—
until this job’s done, no heading home to Michigan—
I spin ultra rogue, which is how it comes to pass
the last of H. G. D. lies full fathom five
off a gravel road, in a quintessential splash of Illinois
corn, near a building marked Fusion Experiments.
Out he does fly from three arks that once held his
(and my) favorite of all flavors: good-bye.
William Doreski
Gloria’s Step
Since matter can’t be created
or destroyed, Scott LaFaro’s bass
still throbs as Bill Evans plays
“Gloria’s Step,” the piano warping
to accept his serious touch.
LaFaro blossomed in these sets.
Figures, cross fingerings, double stops.
His instrument muscled up for him.
The fatal crash spared the music,
affixed on Scotch recording tape
and stashed well away from evil.
Traces of Evans linger despite
internal bleeding that severed him
from himself. Every piano
in the world remembers him
as every upright bass recalls
Scott LaFaro’s impossible strokes.
The crowd at the Village Vanguard
now consists of ghosts too flimsy
to impose their laughter, clatter
of glasses, faux-clever remarks,
too late to regret their inattention.
Evans and LaFaro remain aloof.
The shattered and unstrung bass
circles the planet, their audience
looking up and around in wonder.
Heather Holliger
Lilacs
You wore it like the faint smell of cigarettes
on your clothes, hair, skin.
Wrapping it in rolls of delicate paper
you smoked on my porch
exhaling like you were making
an art of it.
You went through cigarettes
like soap or bread or
toothpaste. I kept your place
with an ashtray.
I washed the stain
out of your clothes,
cleaned where you burned
red-hearted tattoos
onto your skin.
Even now, it’s how I remember you. Not a perfume,
or shampoo, or the smell of your sweat,
but that dark thing I didn’t know how to name.
I wanted to believe
it was mysterious and lovely
like lilacs when the wind
ruffles them. I wanted to believe
that whatever your lips touched
was supposed
to hurt.
Thomas Palakeel
The Owl of Minerva
After a much-loved friend’s memorial service,
invited to take an owl from her collection,
I brought home the tiniest one, matchstick light.
In the palm of my hand, my bird of wood gives me
a look of benevolence and hoots at me a riddle:
“Who cooks for you, who cooks for you?”
All winter, another owl, high up in our woods,
indistinguishable in the bark and branch,
has been tooting away the mysteries of the night.
Shaken in life, Job in the Bible, wept that he only
had company of jackals and owls, my departed
friend had company of two dozen owls, marble,
brass, terracotta, and the wise Owl of Minerva,
which tends to stir only in the twilight of hindsight,
no help in the empire of frenzy, in decline, fall,
but my owl with its rotatable face, keeps taunting
me with another riddle—Who, who, who-who?
Triolet on Friends Retiring
Who among us will ever get to retire?
No one—not Noah, not even his Ark.
Better revel in disembarking the giraffe pair.
Who among us will ever get to retire?
Expect no end to sowing, or harvesting,
Or dismantling the Ark to keep up the fire.
Who among us will ever get to retire?
No one—not Noah, not even his Ark.
Abigail Michelini
Whether or Not
My husband leans a ladder
against our roof
to paint the porch. I go
for a run and return
scanning the ground.
The next day,
my uncle falls
from a ladder
and dies.
I've decided I want to believe
in heaven because,
my husband comes back
around the corner smiling
at me, wearing a jacket
from my neighbor's dead wife,
and side stepping the ladder,
because our prize is the ground
either way. My uncle falls
from a ladder
and dies,
and my husband comes back
to stay, here
in our defensive crouch,
and what do we win
for being logical about it
anyway?
I've decided I want to believe,
whether or not I do.
Robert Fillman
Contemplating the ReturnOn March 18, 1990, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston was subject to perhaps the most notorious art robbery in history. Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee was among the masterpieces stolen.
Which is more likely to return,
Rembrandt's seascape Storm on the Sea
of Galilee or Jesus Christ
himself? The masterpiece has been
missing for more years than Jesus
lived on Earth. Still, all good Christians
await the Second Coming of
the Messiah, while collectors
pray for the painting's proof of life.
Perhaps the canvas is hanging
in an attic like a body
on a cross. Perhaps it's entombed,
gasping behind a concrete wall.
And if I were a better man
I wouldn't believe one prospect
hopeless, the other a matter
of anchoring the mind in faith,
miracles always out of reach.
Alessio Zanelli
Rafah
A cry of glass ascends to the stars,
given the chance by the one big star.
It displaces the dust, tears the silence,
too bulky a silence to remain intact.
Bounced by a transparent ceiling,
it falls back below in splinters,
over the breadth of rubble,
the contorted steel bars
poking from concrete debris
like bones out of mangled bodies,
the blackened pools of dried blood.
Floating slowly, early in the morning
the dust resaturates the ghostly space,
like a fine, homogeneous fog, a poison.
Nothing will reach the stars from here,
nothing leaves here, not even the dust.