Archives for October 2015

Time

Caroline Brooke Morrell

A sweet bee in an old bell.
Tone of what’s made

silently unmade

Commedia

Maxianne Berger

During
these
pewter
days,
maples
deftly
juggle
starlings
but
sloppily
drop
their
harlequin
clothes.

What I was thinking as I kissed you

Ryder Collins

There’ve been way too many mens trying the gates to my garden. Trying to force their ways in or crawl under the fence or jump over with a big pole or bribe my big dog. My dog knows only fur and fangs, respects only the biggest of dicks because he’s so patriarchal in his beastieness. Don’t stalk my garden smoking those spliffs you got from my ex, either. Leave the garden alone. Have you seen my house? Have you smelt my pillowcase or fondled my toilet handle yet? Just a jiggle. Come in, come in. I’ll aeropress you coffee the way I know you’ll like it. I’m feeling your taste buds, those mushroom-bumps raise in meeting. It’s night. I’m on the sidewalk outside my house. Under the streetlight & so obvious. I’m feeling sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami. Eeny meeny, I’m thinking. Miney mo. There’s racism all around me. In me. I’m thinking, The sidewalks are rough & cracked here. I’m thinking, There are so many tastes on this one tongue.

Two Monostich Poems

Scott Wiggerman

 

halfway through the walk       watering the juniper

 

weathered into fine grit       the years

 

Listening to Time

Scott Wiggerman

a golden shovel incorporating a Bashō haiku

The stillness

of night wings, the gentle piercing
of dark heavens, the
soft echoes of this terrain of rocks.

A high desert mesa, the
stars: quiet has a sound.
Fleeing the past in the silence of
now, it returns, droning like cicadas.

Cobb & Co.

Mark Young

We didn’t realize he might be somebody’s grandfather. The age of the char-à-banc had passed us by, & the advent of VistaVision, with its futile attempt to emulate the golden ratio, was something our teachers wouldn’t talk to us about. Dogs fought in the street & distracted us. The town grew dustier by the day. The Town Hall collapsed under the weight of woodworms & the local records all went with it. We coughed, & carried on as we always had.

A line from Pier Paolo Pasolini

Mark Young

I am listening to Stevie
Wonder. Red is the hue
par excellence. I plan to
do some landscaping

around it. It’s a comic that
I need to see made into a
poster. The subject? Life
as a tree, death as a flower.

Bone Yard

Melissa Kwasny

There is an earth below the body, white gleam in what is otherwise sage. You are unafraid, even curious at death now. Ravens pick through the catalogs. In their beaks, the red-brown stain. They hang, a glossy black in the greening house. Today, you walk right into the bone yard, recognizing first a shod hoof. The ribcage further on, the long neck spreading. What is strewn like feathers is hair caught in last year’s grass. You can almost make out an ear. A stillborn calf? A deer? But you, you say, have had enough now. You return to the farmer’s field of right and wrong. Widow’s weeds, or the heavy curtains that signal to the neighbors the house is closed: these are grief rules few of us practice any longer. Shall you say he was released? Did he step out of his mind, or was he flung? You have followed the path back to the river, where you cast river pebbles from shore, as if it were up to you to send him on. You watch them sink, which is, of course, thy will be done.

Swallowtail

Melissa Kwasny

A cloud passes over you and I forget the sun; it comes back and you revive, a state of wonder. Luminosity and complete collapse, tumbling down onto the path but usually able to get up again. You are like a shadow-being, one from the myth, which has slipped with the worms into their cocoons, sleep spun around you in gossamer but sturdy threads, but here you are, gesturing of flight again. Behaviorism, they say, posits that if we want to believe, we act like we believe and eventually we will. If we act ritualistic, we become ritual. If we act like we have all the time in the world. The creek in spring is gathering its chorus, a lot of by-hand shorthand and hourly touch. You say: we remember people by the feeling we once felt for them. Intermediate creatures, remnants left of wind, much is lost off the edge of our dreams. Like the swallowtail in February you pulled from the snow, still soaked in its supernatural beams. Insect tales: we make them up as we enter them, blue eyespots on the wings, blue continuous all around the outer margins. Lemon yellow and horizontal, and much like birds.

From the Gulliver series: Bob Grumman

Anny Ballardini

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