1. This is the time of year when everyone
This time of year everyone

2. The stuff that dreams are made of
Dreamstuff

Copyright 2008 by Changming Yuan

Changming Yuan grew up in rural China, authored three books before moving to Canada, holds a PhD in English and currently teaches writing in Vancouver; his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Canadian Literature, Exquisite Corpse, Istanbul Literature Review, London Magazine, Poetry Salzburg Review, Private (Italy), Southern Ocean Review (New Zealand), Stylus (Australia), Taj Mahal Review and over 100 other literary publications.

1. ‘One of our most important poets’

If you use this phrase, you say absolutely nothing meaningful about a ‘poet.’

Categorize the concept. First you have the category of ‘poet.’ Then you would have ‘a poet’ ‘an important poet,’ ‘a more important poet,’ ‘a most important poet,’ ‘one of the important poets’ ‘one of the more important poets,’ and ‘one of the most important poets,’ ‘one of our important poets,’ ‘one of our more important poets,’ and ‘one of our most important poets.’

What is the difference between these categories of poets by which poets could be categorized and characterized?

You can’t tell until you first define the word ‘important’ and know what it means when a writer uses it to describe, characterize and categorize ‘a poet.’

But the word ‘important’ is undefined and to use it with poet in the two-word phrase ‘important poet’ is to make an obscure subjective characterization that actually says nothing about the poet but says a lot about the writer of the phrase.

What does the use of the word ‘important’ actually import to the reader?

It tells the reader that the writer thinks that a poet is for some reason or reasons important to the writer and should be important to the reader.

And the writer is assuming an air of importance by acting as a self-appointed spokesman for another undefined category referred to by ‘our,’ probably a group called ‘we’ or ‘us’ which may mean poetry writers, poetry readers, poetry teachers, poetry reviewers, or some other undefined group of people such as ‘Americans,’ or ‘humans,’ or possibly even living and dead poetry afficionados from inner and outer space and time.

Any writer who uses the phrase ‘one of our most important poets’ or one of its cousins is propagandizing the reader to agree with the writer about something unsaid.

Using this phrase is a pure and simple intellectual cop out.

Here’s another one: ‘one of the world’s most-admired poets’

How does the writer of this comment know this? Of course the writer asked the world, right? And, naturally, the writer has documentary proof that the writer was appointed by the world to speak for the world, or as above, for ‘us’ by using our?

These statements are arrogant hubris lies. Full honesty requires the writer
to speak only for the writer’s self and not pretend to speak for anyone else.

Okay, now I’ve got it. Let’s call these lowdown lowdog lying-thru-the-fangs statements – hyperbolesms! And just call these writers hyperbolests. And if these doggone dogs want to speak for the whole pack and for every pack everywherre, let them flrst prove they’re world-class alpha before coppin’ the ‘tude.

Comments by Honk – Wednesday, November 19, 2008.

2. ‘This is poetry. This is good poetry. This is bad poetry. This is not poetry. This is a poem. This is a good poem. This is a bad poem. This is not a poem. The writer is a poet. The writer is a good poet. The writer is a bad poet. The writer is not a poet."

Deos it really matter whether the piece of writing is or is not poetry, whether good or bad?

And does it really matter whether the writer is or is not a poet, good or bad?

What difference does it make what you call the writing or the writer?

You could call the poetry writing ‘shorts’ and you could call the writer of ‘shorts’ a ‘shorts-writer?’

What really matters is whether the writing is good writing or bad writing, is entertaining and/or enlightening or not , is fun to read or boring and a drudgery to read, and is worth reading and remembering or not.

Does it really matter what you call the writIng and what you call the writer? Actually it does becasue if you call a piece of writing ‘poetry’ before examining the writing itself, you give an aura of ‘specialness’ to the writing which would color and prejudice any analysis afterward.

WHAT REALLY COUNTS IS THAT THE READER HAD A FUN READ — A GOOD OR GREAT READ! — AN INTERESTING, FASCINATING, EXHILARATING, CAPTIVATING READ!

A REVIEWER OR A CRITIC SHOULD ADDRESS THE WRITING AS A READER LOOKING FOR A GOOD TIME AND SHOULD FIRST ADDRESS THE WRITING FROM THAT PERSPECTIVE, MEANING – IS THE PIECE OF WRITING WORTH READING, REREADING, REMEMBERING, SAVORING AND RECOMMENDING AT ALL WHETHER ACTUALLY POETRY OR NOT!

Comments by Alice from Dallas…..Friday, November 21, 2008

Email us your pet peeves about poetry reviewers and poetry reviewing and if we think you’ve got something worth reading we’ll place it here.
info@tgaps.net

"into dope"

ectoplasm       zero
arid faces that inhabit
               ghostland
hair that cannot be wired
                  shoe lingering
in eternity
                 zoom
                 all of space and
distance too
              condensed in the coffee cup
infinte repetition
           of zinc and fomica
           nothing up
nothing down
            corridors of irretrievable
shadow
            frozen hunger
            the belt            the spoon
the flame like a bit of tinsel
             turning in the eye
traffic of incredible mastodons
converging in the needle
                     rust
                     arabic conclusions
yawning in the metal
                 heap of numbers
gray meat
               zap               the fall
               through algebraic rooms
into a single
                   mirror
                thread of saliva
animal doing circfles
                  in a dry gulch

ivan arguelles
Brooklyn, New York

Decision at the Mortuary

“We’re going in to see your father now,”
his mother whispers.  “Want to say goodbye?”
He stands his tallest, almost to her chin.
Beyond the chapel doors an organ throbs
a mournful dirge that churns the boy’s insides.
Except where two brown cinder-chunks of pain
are burning through, his face is plasterboard,
His eyes,  like a wounded puppy’s, overrun
upon the highway.  Strangely ill-at-ease
in a new dark suit that scratches at his legs,
The young boy thrusts perspiring fists into
the pockets of his coat.  He swallows hard.

He can’t remember, with his head so hot
and whirling like a roller-coaster ride,
just when , or if, his father ever said
goodbye.   (Not in so many words.)
The playful scuffling, ruffling of his hair;
the special handshake with a sudden squeeze –
all these were his.  And messages he gave:
“Chin up!  Behave yourself!”   That sort of thing.

And now his mother’s hand in white kid glove
so tenderly against his stiffened arm
again,  “We’re going in to say goodbye.”
He can’t look  up – he  dare not see her tears.
He can’t be sick, although his stomach turns
at the nauseating smell of smoke-gone-stale,
now intermixed with heavy floral scent.
Still looking down, he wiggles all his toes
inside his stiff black shoes on marble tile
and whispers raspily,  “I’ll just wait out here.”

Nova Trimble Ashley
Wichita, Kansas

One Red Slipper

Look through this dirty window.
Put your face above the rags
stuffed in the broken glass
below the 1936 calendar
from Riley’s Dry Goods Store.
See that torn red slipper
on the shelf above the bench?
Old Lars never got around
to fixing the strap.

They found old Lars,
the little shoemaker,
dark and bloated in his bed;
and there isn’t a chance
that I can dance
in just one slipper
at the county fair next week.

Nova Trimble Ashley
Wichita, Kansas

she filters their sight

a dress is opened up
into a wave
she lifts from her white temples
copies of life
her statue is for men
to leave their boots in
there
in her house of dark flesh
one bowl of a knee
shimned to the bone
from the highway drivers see her
as no more than a snail
smoking under
a star lamp
night can not measure
the fur coming our of her
as her nostrils  pray
over a polished apple
& a silk glove inside her loins.

guy r. beining
Brooklyn, New York

wreckage bubbles up around the open floor

blind to any word
drunkenness for deessert
each night testing the fall of pudding
to dive with one wing
only birds can’t feel
the jewels
& the woman of real flesh
is in the monkey circle
her necklace blasts open their ribs.
on the other side of a row of darkness
the traffic brightens
we wipe the weeds without touching them
& I wonder why it was
that my hand passed thru maps
& into the hills that felt
like her knees.

guy r. beinng
Brooklyn, New York

The Magician

mWhen you speak, your hands
open
their pages and words sail out

as your potter’s fingers shape air,
working from left to right
coming together to draw water.

Now, they are the long tendons
of rivers, shaping
and reshaping their banks.

Now, they palm surfaces as wind
planes branches and the sky
springs closer.

Following one another, they invent
forests, stalk prey,
stealthy among the trembling leaves.

When they part, elands
plunge through savannahs, the sky
darkening with birds.

Dr. Marguerite Bouvard
Wellesley, Massachusetts

Hobo Heaven

full of small fires
under bean cans

an all night refuge

where old friends
shake hands

and exchange
directions

Peter Brett
Ross, California

San Francisco

a fat lady
in a small room
having a hawk
tattooed on her thigh
the blood red moon

Steven Ford Brown
Birmingham, Alabama

Together

your breasts feel
as soft as the belly
of a small bird
& your heart races
like a frightened deer
skittering over
wolf-tracked snow

Steven Ford Brown
Birmingham, Alabama

THE ANTIPODES

                         for Thornton Wilder  1897-1975

Beyond the one-legged knots
and the ruddy turnstones
scolding the sea back,
he must have been hidden,
one shawl among those many lawn chairs
facing Mexico.
I passed him where he lay concealed
in the shadows of Australian pines.
Why should I recognize him
so far from Our Town?

The light there never lets go.
It clings like leaf scale, it infests
the acres of tangled mangrove
with its most virulent shingle.
Useless to rage.
The light is not dying, it shines
in the belly of the fish
seized by the osprey in midair.
Only a man was dying
with the light in his open hands.
If I had known.

Would he have preferred Monadnock,
any hilltop in New Hampshire, oaks
with the clouds caught in their branches?
Or was he sick
of the righteous
neverland of Grover’s Corners?
On my way to pick shells
I passed him.  I would have heard
if he had said “Goodbye, world”
or “good riddance.”  It was not in the cards
and now I don’t know what to think.

It is raining in Michigan.
A whirlwind has leveled a deserted barn
and a trailer camp whose vehicles
were born without wheels
and would never make it to Florida.
Nursing homes
are full
of the madness of small towns,
those who failed at everything
and then failed to die.  For a while they posed
as the stomach “embattled,” firm
against annexation, the city
with its attendant psychiatry and crime,
and then gave in.  At cockcrow
three times and three times again
they denied Geroge and Emily.

"In the single is the most profound.”
I think it’s more like a rope bridge
suspended over some Peruvian chasm.
The strands when they dry
snap with the weight of so many pilgrims
and below them is a darkness and a pit
the fiber causeway can span
but never explain.
As they fell between narrowing walls
were they given insight,
could they read the strata of split rock
marbled with amber and iron -
a nostalgia to be in at the beginning?
The simple is also the end
and the reduction to essential form
is neverthelesss a reduction
as the waters in the canyon's depth know.

Some of the birds on that beach
had flown in from as far as Venezuela
rounding the arc
of Antilles, the boundary stones
that may have been mountains on the rim
of a crater, islands
as high as Monandock or as deep.
Not one of us on that beach
with our heads bowed to catch
the perfect angel's wing
have ever been to Venezuela,
though I rememnber the long slope to timberline
from the pitched tent
at the foot of the mountain near Jaffrey
and the whitethroats.
Old man, were they your dead
or the sad living?

If I had seen you those final days
below the veranda or the scarred palms
of the Island Inn,
I might have asked to sit down,
to sort these colored shells
or string coral, to be present for a time
and say nothing
of what went wrong.

E.G. Burrows
Ann Arbor, MIchigan

THE GREAT AUCTION:  EXTINCTION OF A BREED

Ants cart on their backs
oblongs of Rembrandt and Vermeer,
and what arts can't be lugged, they doff.
Here comnes one with a stirrup cup
Tucked inhis briefcase.
The Hals on his head keeps the rain off.

HIgh bidders have emptied the ducal mansion.
Ants trickile their loot
of candlesticks, crystal, imps
grimacing from their choir stalls,
into parked vans.
The dragon is dead.  His guard
down, his very rich hours  taxed
to the last chime, he took it
on the chin, his gains
went under the hammer.
Now he is despoiled of his hoard
and shuffles among the destitute of heaven.

So the ants crwoned
with a thousand flowered chamber pots
are more or less equal,
averaged by law to a snuffbox each
and a Miro.
No blood shed but no
Winter Palace left to storm,
they heed the injuunctions and erect
a condominium with the crucial stones.

E.G. Burrows
Ann Harbor, Michigan

LIVING TOGETHER

All night a battering,
the shingles wail, the doors
withstand.  In the  branches the wind
manufactures terror
as we huddle
in a nest of blankets
to keep out everything
beyond these walls.

Joan Colby
Streamwood, Illinois

Waking

Up late this morning
                                                  and reading newspapers
and drinking coffee
                                                  my wife brought up
on a tray.
                                                  Daughter
playing on one end
                                                  of the big mattress
while I struggled to
                                                  clear my head, naked
from the waist down.
                                                  Finally, and not knowing
it, Maxie had worked
                                                  around to where she saw
that little bit of
                                                  penis morning betrays
between my legs,
                                                  sky
overcast and thick
                                                  with the October cold and
coffee steaming and
                                                  delicious in the mug.
She had reached once
                                                  and I watched her face,
feeling myself sudenly
                                                  embarrassed.  That look
all of a grasping sudden,
                                                  as though  I were immediately
a little gate and a knob
                                                  was all there was between
her and the larger world
                                                  outside.  I covered up
and said three or four
                                                  things in a language
neither of us understand.

Paul Christensen
Bryan, Texas

THE HERITAGE

Deep inside her cedar chest
my mother concels the faces
of cracked and holy ancestors--

the jungle, a gentlman ape
beaming at his lady,
a hairy ballerina
with Grandma's dolly on her head;

a tree shrew, bat-faced cousin
sagging on a bar stool,
eager to thrust his minaret
into a tulip.

And O the new mother
cooling while her wee alligator
reaches for the cockroach
caught in my jockstrap.

I am frightened by hoards of fish
sliding down the chimney
tail-first, strange Santas
dangling from my father's neck.

And how I love the spitting bagpipe!
Sessile and magnificent mother
of tadpoles
squirming in a sea of stars.

My grandpa's forehead
is covered with urchins and starfish.
His nose is an arm
and O the elegance

of shimmering pink flatworms--
living ribbons
writhing in Aunt Lily's hair,
while Uncle Henry's stomach

is adorned with amoebae,
stentors, and paunchy paramecia
scooting and rolling madly
around his navel.

But I'm glaed
there won't be a cedar chest,
cobweb-covered in the corner
next time--no coffin,

only meadows
embroidered with poppies and grass,
forests interlaced with junipers,
madrones and black oaks,

all beaded with nests
and woven with sky--
then I'll hope for hollow bird bones
and endless flight.

Lucille Day
Oakland, California

OLD HOTELS

Old hotels intrigue me,
Faded silk and tarnished brass
And dusty glass tiles lining pools filled with leaves,
Where broken cherubs still smile.

Curious but unconcerned,
A graying clerk observes my air of studied casualness
As I ascend the bird cage lift in cranking jerks
To exsplore in secret.

With quiet care,
I reach to touch the cracked facades
Or sit and trace the dirty swirls of thinning color
on a carpeted stair.

Decaying elegance surrounds me
in the stale and musty air of dim lit halls,
And bids me linger,
"Please!"
"Just a few minutes more,"
Like some ancient relative
Desperate to whisper her sad secrets.

And so,
I peer through grimy windows
At forgoten ballrooms,
Where satin couples once danced.
Where polilshed parquet
Reflected chandeliers of frosted glass and crystal
And nights were made of laughter and champagne and gardenias.

The whisper in my ear turns to weeping
As I gaze at broken fixtures and ruined floors,
Crowded now with old refrigerators
And piles of dirty mattresses.
Silent cripples locked with the past
Behind the frosted French doors.

Valorie Ditton
Los Angeles, California

HERO TAKING A BATH

Sea-dreams, lengths of sausage.
Boston whores and motorcyclists inhabit them.
But he's at ease now, his broadsword
limp in the suds....
Speaking of suds, perhaps a Schlitz to cool
the bath-warmed body lounging.
The refrigerator's in reach,
the opener's his chipmunk teeth.
He loves the slush of bathwater when he rolls
his nsnakeskin body from side to side.
Cleansing the mind
and breath he devours a book
pausing occasionally to tip his head and stare
out and up at the stars.
Window dressers are preparing
a new constellation for him.
It depicts him
on his back under Cassiopeia:
a rhinestone-studded ramrod connects them,
as if he'd cleaned a pistol.
He's pleased with this life,
he's met all the gods and devils,
he's drunk blood from plaster bowls.
For now the grime
of a city evening,
later a veil of angels falls
not to calm but to excite him.
The beer bottle busts in his hand, his curly
sunflower head sways on its stalk, his child-mind
closes for the night.
Dripping thunderstorms,
he rises.
The neighbors weep, but his weapons smile,
too polished to kill:
he only wants to play before
sneaking off to sleep.

William Doreski
Cambridge, Massachusetts

OAK SQUARE WAKING

When I woke, you were the kitten rasping
me up and down, your style
was gay with creosote and balm,
we could've stuck together.
Now the day perks over Oak Square.
I've hardly ever been down here,
even the dogs semed bored with dawn.
Coffee? And a little more tease, if you will.
Your body is glass, it filters the sun;
doubled as it passes through you,
conscience splashed against one brilliant wall,
its brother forked through the groin....
Propped in a corner and smiling, I still can feel
the grooves and scars on my body.
Eggs? Over light.
Whose blood mars the sleep-in sofa?
Now the sun gathers skirts and
I'm in the shade again,
your plants look out with longing while
with the aluminium keen of a star
the Brighton bus pants at a traffic light,
sours the air.
I think of your mouth and know all mouths are weapons,
that sick breath tries to quiet me----
It's not fair, not fair, the dark returns:
my mother's at the door!
Do you hear me, crouched by the stove?
I'm creeping back to those worldly plots,
my body rustles plant-like and dry....
I leave you a primer for chapped lips;
choke down your tea and stoop, and lick
the pages from the floor.

William Doreski
Cambridge, Massachusetts

PRODIGIOUS NIGHT

night of elongated shadows
night of kisses exploding like pomegranates
night of annihilating air gliding ravenously into me
night of drugs of lovers copulating into fragments
night of translucent darkness of diseased combs
night of impossible insects in motionless rooms
night of complaining motors
night of hands of clusters of reflections
night of rivers gorged on mirrors and blood-thirsty floodgates
night of sugar cane and splinter of Chinese music
night of boots of wild perfume
night of fear of prayer and astral travel
night of blood on the cemetery snow of solitude
night of clots in cumulus minds of violence
night of indiscovery of black gloves waving flagstones
night of rain of erotic repetitions of mountains
night of crushed chins of whips of lightning
night of conversational stones in the beards of bells
night of passionless cries of iridescent tears of shoes
night of silent forgetting of black caresses of bandages
night of chipped teeth and the insomnia of lava
night of electric foreskins
night of diaphanous hourglass of clearing houses for silence
night of tattered seeds strewn over black centuries
night of yellow eyes and sparks of fingernails
night of peaches of ground glass
night of forever gathering its thread on precipices and radios
night of resignation as weightless as the fog of headlong hope

Franz Douskey
New haven, Connecticut

$10,000 SCREENPLAY

morning.
cats fighting outside the window.
a friend calls & asks how
the writing is coming.
he writes screenplays;
he's "into the continuity" of
writing screenplays.
I'm foggy; don't want to talk about
                                                         poetry or how it's coming
poetry!
I'm sick of talking about poetry.
cats fighting outside the window.
I don't want to talk about poetry!
a helicopter is overhead
looking for an outlaw.
the man next-door
                                         is kicking the shit out
of the woman next-door.
poetry is the outlaw!
nobody pays $10,000
for a poem.

C. Douglas Draime
Los Angeles, California

THE ONLY THING SHE SAID
ON THE NIGHT ROBERT KENNEDY DIED

her great aunt & uncle
died into
skeletons
in the camp;
their friend Huntz
turned them in
on the night of
August the first
1939
after he ahd eaten
dinner with them
& joked and laughed
& denounced
HItler
with them.
he was seen getting
out of a
Gestapo
car & pointing to
their house two hours
after he
                      broke
bread with them.

C. Douglas Draime
Los Angeles, California

In The Heart Of The Desert NIght

DARK

the deseert night

THE

the desert night

RIVER

the desert night

FLOWING

the desert night

SOUTH

the desert night

DARK

the desert night

AS

the desert night

THIS

the desert night

DESERT

this desert night

NIGHT

L.S. Fallis
Las Cruces, New Mexico

                                                Journey's End

NOW                       NOW                  the                   city

snow                   margo                       DO                             IT

DO                      IT                        forty                         years

it                        was                         all                             for

nothing              NOW                 NOW               black

this                    night                        DO                         IT

DO                      IT                        the                       taste

of                       metal                         JUMP                         JUMP

JUMP                  there                  is                  only

this                      DO                     IT                      DO

IT                          a                        gold                         watch

NOW                   NOW                    and                     port

charlotte               DO               IT            DO

IT                         margo                        how                         cold

the                        wind                        NOW                        NOW

how                     much                        I                      wanted

to                         JUMP                         JUMP                          JUMP

L.S. Fallis
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Manitoba Winerscape

twilight

the winter sky

the               stars
brilliant         in
forty            degreees
of                 frost

holding my hand

yo9u skate across
this winter pond

cathy

this             memory
my              warmth

as
the
coldwinds
of
february
howl
along
the
desert
rim

L.S. Fallis
Las Cruces, New Mexico

                                                                San Jacinto Plaza

1           sullen         3         eye         9         

2          men          4          supple

                                                                     5                                         hips

                                         6                                         and

                                         7                                         curse

                                         8                                         relentless

L.S. Fallis
Las Cruces, New Mexico

The Act Along The Wire

Along the telephone wire,
a squirrel pauses.
The black cord signals him,
and he squats, surveying.
Wires pass from pole to pole,
to garage roof,
highways between homes.
One squirrel
crosses upside down,
slower than the rest,
the star to work without the net.
Their home can weave across the city,
a web, their private sky;
or root them here,
in that tree or the next,
these troupe mimes
of footing and distance.

D. Folts-Gray
Morristown, Tennessee

I LIVE TO SMUGGLE BLUE-PLATE SPECIALS OF DEATH
INTO YOUR SECRET & CUSHY CAFES

In the 2nd-grade I fell in love
with Kathleen Waters

I never told her till this poem
I never dipt blonde braids
in inkwells; only borrow'd
her eraser once

Even tho her father was the finest
mailman whoever carried Altadena,
I never got a chance to play postoffice

Now, after scored years filthy with
sophistication - drugginG & drinking
& living like a thief; falling asleep
behind the voices of soft music
& hard women

Now, thinking back on all these chicks
chalkt off the old existential tote-
sheet - you know, in simply off-the-
cuff comparison - you understand,
2nd-grade Kathleen comes up in my mind
sharp as a steak-knife I stole from
the Stork Club in 1964

Michael C Ford
Los Angeles, California

This morning I walk out
to see you again
in downed precision diving
for who knows what is left
beneath icy watered rivulets
of the ice-blocked bay,

wondering as I walk
how small creatures
survive a winter.

This afternoon land developoers
plumed in coats filled with feathers
point the boundaries
of the new tall building

which will block my view of the bay
and yours.  You squat
to keep your webbed feet warm,
how your broad beak holds.

Ray Freed
Westhampton Beach, New York

AFTER PAYING A $396 DATSUN REPAIR BILL

Japanese assembly line workers
sing company songs around
Datsun car bodies moving
down the conveyor belt.

They play ping-pong
on their lounch break
or squat neck-deep in heated water
at the workers' baths.

When a car completes the line,
the eight men responible
sit down ina circle
to discuss what they've done.

Then foreheads to the hood they
vow this car is free from  error
and place side by side their
thumb prints on the windshield.

At night the chosen one
sleeps in the back seat;
in his constant dreams he
imagines long journeys.

Some say he awakes
in the dark of the night,
lifts up the hood and puts
his fingers where he wants.

Some days mistakes are made;
the supervisor in a quiet voice
informs the one to blame
precisely what went wrong.

He nods, bows stifly,
solemnly clenches the muscles
in his jaw and upper arms
and falls on his grease gun.

The other workers avert
their eyes for shame.

William Heath
Highland, New York

burn

maybe i would be easier to be
one woman bound by fate but i
am so many there's alwasy a new
way to look at stars from
a dancer's summer hill naked
neath a navel moon or saying
how much more i love the sun
in your hair than all the suns
in space and how much more i
fear the blackness of your eyes
than all the abyss beyond these
galaxies we seem to be lost in
from the way love is so lets hope
someway in this flashing instant
that you find in me so many secrets
you never come out again
o i would rather have a sunday
with a luscious person tham all
the multihued skin eternity could con
sume deep within the earth is
a great heart beating and i
lie upon it knowing i am where i
want to be you let me ride and i
ll show moon's tide
that only ocean knew till you
i never finish navigating
your burning current smells delic
ate as a paintbrush fire out of
control in wet spring mountain air

Mary Heckler
Pocatello, Idaho

                    Union Junction

        cheek against the cold rail
delicate flakes of snow
                         on silver

grow transparent returning
         for a moment their cyrstalline
               form then only a prismic drop
                   against the silver

Rob Hollis MIller
Union, Oregon

MACHISMO

When I first went off with a freind
down into the dark unknown of Mexico
my mother worried:
bandidos lurking in every doorway
dangers everywhere

we took the train from Mexicali to Guaymas
second class
the poor people
the continuing real people of Mexico
cheap food     corn meal & chiles
in through the windows

Acros from us     sharing a space
during  part of our tripo down south
quiet swarthy men
physically close to the desperados  my mother'd imaginied
what to say
keep our knees & eyes from meeting

And when the vendors came through
while my friend & I drank beer
those dark-eyed bandidos drank milk

Dennis Holt
Santa MOnica, California

SILENCE

Through the ages the ocean cliffs
have been crying out
to the birds.

Dale Jacobson
Grand forks, North Dakota

GRAND CENTRAL STATION

A yoked Zapotec
carrying water
to nowhere

Tom Jones
Washington, D.C.

strait jacket

once harry houdini slipped your lock
and leapet out of your pocket
like a snake's skin
you molted off his back
albino monkey
you lay there
as limp as god's sock

which inmate in this amonia-stung academy
invented you?
sack of saints
bag of martyrs
satchel full of fur and squawks?
which orderly ordered you
like ether
from the pharmacy's meat shelf?

they say you aqueeze drunks dry
with your wet corsetry
they say you are fire proof
proof of voodoo
proof

how the lunatics hug you
wrapping their arms around your canvas heart
they jump up and down
halfway in and halfway out
of your cocoon

moon mohter
your leather straps
strap down the wings of those who fly
buckle up the tongues of those who tell

shell
there are no cracks
in you

Terry Kennedy
Duxbury, Massachusetts

yesterday

yesterday it was so good
love poems rising up out of the cracks
in the cafe table
waitresses with henna hair
acting polite
coffee from the top of the pot
even the rain fell perfectly
onto the hollywood set of the streets
yesterday i had the thought of you
wrapped around me like a shawl
i was a big deal woman
with men
falling in love with my name
before they met
and when they met me they stayed
because i was the answer
yesterday i was the miracle worker
today
the kitchen floor needs washing
the sox need mending
and i am eating a n.y. times recipe
called
moussaka for the masses

Terry Kennedy
Duxbury, Massachusetts

I wanted to be the one

I wqanted to be the one
who struck him as rich,
swell enough to create
applause inside his skin
I wanted the echo
of his scream of pleasure
to harmonize with my last note
to make all the notes
swimming against the white page
leap out and join me in a dance
like animated figures
solemnly drawn
by one with a plan

I wanted to bring him
that elusive high
borne down from its mountain
where others enjoy it
as common as candy bars
I wanted to taunt him
with my wrapper
and have him discover
an inside he wouldn't
squeeeze and throw away --
to be the one he would save

Binnier Klein
Westport, Connecticut

Cape May Point

clear cloud      skymare's tumbleweed     rustle river
banks fluff bayt     impair wind will
den     earth ear     sea wrestler
piked marsh     sedge screecfhes     tangled sentinel

ramble among ground objects:
tired knot, clumped algae, horseflies, guts,
strapless gauze handbag, fish hands, battered buoy,
tire ruts, plastic botle, egg pod wreath,
scrolled periwinkle, sandfleas, ripped nest,
leathery spine, thread spool, mussel castinet

sand stunt     arch     shadow prowls
cluster     burrow     hieroglyphic
nacreous meadow     wayward impulse

Charles Lynch
Brooklyn, New York

extensive harm to delicate mechanisms

the gifted are here     create forgiveness
hi school is not doin they job
time river veils vile valley of tears
mind's corner cornered     mined with slob

hun nuns flung flat in vestibules
curt detours     moronic architectonic
a certs     as physicological rule
if birth worth berth     at's cool

clumsoid shriek     stained glass in brownsville
tar any penny par     till tootsie role
walk wild     slide     eddy     pimp strut prance
limp stroll     linger perhaps advance

wince in winch of wicked work
cop slyly apts tap room spume
ignorance print     nickname object lesson
game gun show     shoe shootum sputum blessin

when wheat was safe     when locks was lox
linguini ledger bikini  pledger box
chafed glimmer near shimmer imminent pen
drawn near brawn     breeze brain drain

ought autocrats swat satin flies
ought neon snore yore thought orbit
changed angel     dust     on which emerged
a junta     a troika     a nixon     a purge

thee stalagmite vane of tired jewel
he street smart idiot gores care's car
we wreath soaked sassafras     husk of dawn
she whisk disco up on a star

        clock empty        hands off
        somebody teach preachers how to live
        crying        scowlin
        rent ragged night

saves sense satan
bomb god good book

Charles Lynch
Brooklyn, New York

Milton Lane's Snapshots

scrimage blizzard whizzed
sand blasted land escape
glance goes out in huff
full house  peels in lofter:  eek oing choop oonk

O wizard of technically hideous photographs
essential rout:  to take
earthquake    mirthmake    girthfake
find views in fun house gloom room
solice life light twice in bog fog agog

forehand forehead's foreground
bow tied shark horn rim gleam
silver mud lorry caravan out
hoed elbow busy figurine
confetti clones in harmattan
grin shear cue ass ears fingers
cassava sprawl along savannah path
poise satin munch duckpin trophy
decal dorsal bumper Hertz van
termite tents in gunbboat spats
hunch caftan lecture linoleum patch
claque of chicken    backs of buildings

Charles Lynch
Brooklyn, New York

HOMECOMING

   the faded
pictures waiting
on warped shelves
   like snipoers

James Magorian
Lincoln, Nebraska

ANOTHER BALLAD

"You bastard!" she shouted
drawing back her arm.

The beer bottle
came at my face
point-blank,
from 3 feet away.

I caught it.

You have to have
the reactions
of a gunfighter

to survive
in a marriage.

Joseph McLaughln
New Philadelphia, Ohio

                      Union Junction

       check against the cold rail
delicate flakes of snow
                                    on silver

grow transparent returning
         for a moment their crystalline
                 form then only a prismic drop
                            against the silver

Rob Hollis Miller
Union, Oregon

MORNING RINGSIDE

The top of the tulip tree
boxes with the wind,
bobs, weaves, tips way over
(that roundhouse really landed)
and the birds whistle,
scream for a knockout
loud enough to lift me,
knocked out all night,
onto my feet again
before the count of ten.

Lillian Morrison
New York, New York

PLENITUDE

If that dogwood, attired
insoftest red, were a woman,
she would be blond, warm,
with blue eyes, a touch of rose
in her cheeks, and a delicate
husky-toned speech.  She would be
in her prime, just beginning
to age, leaning to plumpness,
impeccably dressed, and with a
full-blown, drooping grace
would suddenly fill
the unsuspecting room
with fangs of fire
as this tree does
the leaf-strewn yard.

Lillian Morrison
New York, New York

PEDIGREE PARTS

"The composite liver of an alcoholic ward.
The feet of failed Olympic runners.
Two hands adept at surgery
And strangulation, questionable vices.
A St. Bernard's penis,

Starved on a diet of snowscapes.
Choice ruptures, a crushed sternum.
thumbs able to execute
Chickens in a pinch, a tongue
From the poet of that alcoholic ward.

The missing arm of an Italian statue.
Musical sweetbreads, toes like
Frozen daggers, the toupee found
In a bus station wash room.
One camera's eye, 800 ASA, vision

Enough for cruising by nightshine,
Scanning anonymous spleens and bruises,
The eternal gold tooth.
Then the tender-sided heart of Siamese twins,
Longing for something friendly.

Something blind and deaf, perhaps
An Aztec weddding mask.  And museum bones,
Unearthed in Burma, packaged now
And catalogued, skeleton bait of things
That go fishing for common sutures, a host.

G.E. Murray
Oak Park, Illinois

THE HESITATION COMEBACK

Piecing together pages of a dictionary
    quartered
By a strongarm, I acquire a personality
    fit for
Public wear.  After years of cultivating
    seizures,
Lending blood money, borrowing it back,
    there are
Simple signs:  The vicious eyes I trained
    to stalk
Like insatiable pets no longer ambush
    loved ones;
Glass has lost its flavor; Artic dark
    bubbles
Its last hurrah in my bloodstream.  So
    it goes.
When I saw these fun suds of affection
    issue
From my lips like regulation language
    instead
Of hieroglyphics, or words slurred along
    grapevines,
When I offered to finance a new cosmos,
    chisel
A monument to recipes for sainthood, I
    knew then
This flight of love would seal and band me:
    "pigeon."

G.E. Murray
Oak Park, Illinois

WHEN THE HILLS BECAME WEST VIRGINIA

When the wind first walked off
And whistled south,
Grass was hearsay;
Sun, the sudden rumor
Of seasons told in tongues
The sky interpreted
As a lasting accident,
A totem of love.

When night stood in the ground
Like a relic,
A secret keepsake
From the horizon's tomb,
A story was born
Of reeds and pinesmell,
Vast spans of carnivorous green,

Fropm one early winter to next,
A fortune in light
Wound through these hills
LIke a fresh scar.
Tablets of air
Went unread.
Silence improved
Its raw reserves.

Around ice and sacred backwaters,
Among the long speeches
Of trees, lectures
On rockfall, furious
Landslide omen,
Signals of other life rose
in howls, in smoke,
somewhere beyond
This spilling thickness.

Birsds here married
MId-air, wings in tilt,
Under the blessing
Hands of sunshine.
And beneath oak's splitting
Bark and crook,
A braid of insects
Wormed inhonor
Of nothing so beautiful,
Nothing absolute...

And a deer's head, dead asleep,
Educated earth
By its infinite dreaming,
Private as the chart
Once mistaken
For the original hole of midnight,
Guiding small eyes inward
In blind delight.

Then all the stones unturned
Imagined themselves
Set in a grave of mortar,
Saw nameless animials
Freeze in sight
Of new tracks,
And all stones
Spoke righteously
Of infection,
An abscess of space,
The distance narrowing
Between stone's
Word and gunpowder sermon...

And in that hushed congestion,
When scents of fear
Finally ascended
In witnes of cliffs,
When trails below
Burned up through evergreen
Like fuses,
The hearsay grass was crushed
Into Wagon ruts -- wind
Tested gingham,
Screeched like a bird
Waking to sawmills,
Gave homespun promise
to those who outfit
The dark with logfires,
Confusion's song, the rules
These hills would always ignore.

G. E. Murray
Oak Park, Illinois

THE  BEEF-STUNNER MAN

The hind was a hock of darkness among the meaty trees
The boning a ghostly bacon comb just tossed into the freeze
The loader a ribbon of gripstrut over the offal door
And the beef-stunner man came fliring -
Firing - firing
The beef-stunner man came firing, over the squeegeed floor.

He'd schermer caps in his rubber gloves, a bunch of blanks
On his skid,
A duck filled cook and baker's coat, and bloodstained
Apron bib
They fitted as well as a wash-up suit, his boots by
Goodyear Tires
And he carried a primal breaking saw
To cut and quarter up the raw
His horn cutter sterilized once more on the end of his power wires.

Over the gutters he splattered, and triggered his slaughtering gun
He grabbed the steer by the withers, confused, the aniimal's head
it spun
He whistled a tune to the carcass, spreqad on the killing floor
Then dragged the beast to the drop spreader hook
Valvces and rail stops and drop spreader hooks
Unlike the cast iron lodedstar hoists, the chains and gears are for.

And dark by the Johnson hide stripper, an operator stands
Where Gus the skinner listened, his face pressed in his hands
HIs eyes were hollows of madness, his shroud pins strewn about
But he loved the bull stud's daughter
Bess the old bull's duaghter
Now fifty meat patties, in a food-shaper's route.

One kiss, my bonny patties, I'm after nutrition, I'm miffed
And I shall be back with a filmy shrink-wrap, before the
Morning shift;
If the foreman press me sharply, and harry me through the day
Then look for me by the grinder
The butcher-boy AA56 grinder
I'll come for you by the grinder, though the meat-packer bars
The way.

Gus arose in his PVC apron, he scarce could reach
Her shape
But he grabbed his neoprene glove from the bench, with
Fingers bound up in see-thru tape
As the poroduction line of paties came rolling down the belt
He kissed his Bess on the vacuum device
The bush pump houseing, the vacuum dvice
The he grabbed her tight as a vice, and bent at the
Sealer he knelt.

Opal N. Nations
Toronto, Canada

KEHOE BEACH

indifferent
to fisherman

the gray sea

I watch my urine
sink
into the sand

toe
a gull carcass

fog moves
closer

becomes
wind-burned
old man

coast farmer

"Have you seen a boy
couple years younger
than this one?
He vanished

on the beach.

Supposed to be
hauling rock.

He's not at the truck
Not at the ranch."

glasses magnify
his gray eyes

his other son
in blue nylon
is scared

we look
for him

ghost shrimp
torn crabs

Nona Nimnicht
Oakland, California

INSOMNIA

I couldn't fall
asleep.  The small
town was too quiet.
Crickets rubbed night
songs bertween their
thin knees.  The men
on the moon could
be heard walking
back and forth over
its grin.  He was
waiting to leave with
the first rain.

The retired salesman,
who never grows
old, walked quietly
past my door, to his
room at the end of
the hall.  Only his
shirt was loud.  On
the third floor the
seventy-three-year-old
ex-flapper's mind
finally snapped.  It
made me jump.

The old boarding
house was built 75
years ago in between
beers.  I listened
to its white paint
moan gray again
and to the last
white hairs move
into the landlord's
scalp, that was
once red as a sore
throat.

Kevin Pilkington
Mount Vernon, New York

MOSES

Moses sits alone at
the bar.  His red eyes
hide in caves bove
a long gray beard.  All
night, it tries to dip its
tail into his gin.

Burning ashes crawl
down a cigarette, taunting
his hand, it mannequins
next to another double.

The railroad tracks run
behind the tavern's back.
Each time the express
trains by, the liquor bottles
start to dance.  Moses
chaperones.

He has been coming here
for years.  The moose, shot
with beginner's luck, still
grins above the songs
that jukebox against the
wall.

Smoke hanging like
the barmaid's chest, hopes
for a window to open.
The bathroom walls wait
for new jokes.  Upstairs
are small apartments.

When the days are in
heat, tenants hang with
the laoundry outside their
windows.

Moses has decided to
politely wait for the paint
on the walls to fade, before
going home to his wife,
who no longerr waits
up for him.

Kevin Pilkington
Mount Vernon, New York

PASSING THROUGH

Bald tires keep me
under the speed limit.
Small animals hit by
strange cars lie in the
side of the road.  Three
miles from a chipmunk's
tall white houses, village in
front of a mountain with
a cloud stuck on its peak.

Old folks don't die here.
They sit on porches rocking
naps into their eyes.  Hounds
doughnut at their feet.
Women with green thumbs
worry about their gardens
and the flowers that won't
come.  Good looking girls,
I blame on clean air.

Main Street is smaller
than the change in my
pocket.  White Fences
picket around the church
and courthouse.  Young
farm boys carve their
names into the belly of
a large oak before heading
east.

There is no crime: the sun
is too strong for muggers.
Streets don't bum with derelicts.
There aren't any alleys to
junkie in.  Whores trick what
they can in the next village
too small to name on the
map and rapists never
leave the park back home.

Kevin Pilkington
Mount Vernon, New York

THE OLD NEIGHBORHOOD

After 8 years I
stopped to visit the
old neighborhood.
Memories kept coming
back like manuscripts.
My old apartment
was smaller than
the tips in the diner
below it.  The sinks
in the bathroom and
kitchen roached.  When
the nights got cold
as the girl in 2A, a
pint was kept on
the table for heat.

The couple above me
use to methadone
visits to the clinic
3 bus stops away.
In the jazz cloub
across the street,
horn players would
bring new licks, to
dixie the sun up.

The Valucci brothers
no longer deli great
heroes on the corner.
The store is up for
sale.  I heard they
left around the
time old Joe the
barber's memory did.

Italian granmothers
like to sit in front
of their buildings
during the day,
watching cars tie
themselves into jams
by 5.  They worry
about the Cubans
2 blocks down and
the muggings that
keep going up with
the rents.  Now they
go in with the sun.

The stickball game
started the night I
left, was still going
on in front of the
laundromat.  My
old friend, Little Jack,
use to have a hard time
keeping secrets, now
it's jobs.  Drunks
keep alleys
wet in between rain
storms.  When the
skies clear, rainbows
crayon the oil stains
that slick the street.

Mrs. Grady runs the
magazine stand.  She's
a brouge full of gossipo.
No one knows her
brother will start
to bookie time in
prison next month.

Billy's Pub has gone
topless.  The girls
sell the drinks, a
color TV and good
jokes couldn't.  The
A bus, with its beast
of lights, continues
to rattle past the
kids on 6 Ave. and
the firehydrant that
will always be
closer than the beach.

Kevin Pilkington
Mount Vernon, New York

GASOLINE ALLEY

The young girl who runs
Harbor Tunnel Change Booth Number Four
pops lemonheads and likes jazz
far too much to
give it up at work.
On cool, August midnights
she'll cue up none but Satchmo on the player
and shag those cars through with a fancy wave
'til half the northbound Monord Lane is just
jivin' aloud.

Michael Reis
Baltimore, Maryland

cracking her hard cool surface
in the halls of the blind
she was just a tough frightened kid
with the devil in her

           trailing in the auras, mandalas
           imprinted on the ancient stone
           where she sips the blood of her children

illegitimate daughter of a juvenile offender,
mama stuck her in reform school at thirteen;
according to San Francisco officers
she had been very promiscuous sexually

           at the age of five, Walter was
           paralyzed on the right side, wracked
           by frequent seizures

practicing prostitution for several years -
pretty girl alone in a bar means just one thing
she confessed, ‘if i’d been an ugly duckling,
it wouldn’t have had to happen this way’

           he showed severely disturbed speech
           & was found on testing to have a mental
           age of four

married a mechanic, then a sailor in ’43
he shipped out while she made a perjury rap
covering for two buddies ina burglary case
she got paroled, worked as a dice girl in Reno

           after medication failed to stop the seizures,
           Walter’s doctors reluctantly carried out
           a drastic operation

married a salesman, then a bartender (junkie)
who gave her his name – meanwhile got fed up on him
& went with a little sporty guy, face like a weasel;
steered clients by the rod to his gambling palace

           the removal of the whole left hemisphere
           of Walter’s brain – today, 21 days alter
           he is an industrial executive & part-time student

she resembled Lana Turner, ran with John Santo
Californiqa hold-up man long enough to shakedown
the crippled ex-mother-in-law of a Vegas Gambler
suspected of holding his cash

           the doctor could show that the adult right
           hemisphere reads & follows directions which
           the subject cannot then repeat

who on the night of March 3, 1953 being fascinated
by the Purple Pony Murders, answered the door
to a man who shoved her back while he shoveled
awful shapes into her hat & coat closet

           the apartheid of St. Paul, the separation
           of left & right hemispheres – innocence
           as the avoiding of experience

detectives picked up safecracker, he chattered:
it was Shorter did the job with Santo,
John True, Emmet "Weasel" Perkins, and his girl
Barbara Graham

           in a corridor of doors, nightmare of
           gesturing disembodied leapers buried beneath
           a thousand poisoned Colorado Rocky Mountain sheep

Shorter got called – first down to headquarters
& then for a short ride with Perkins; he allowed
as how he heard Barbara had pistol-whipped Mrs. Monahan
who was bound & helpless – he was only lookout

           Freud pointed out that the dream still retained
           the fantastic freedom of association known to us
           before only from ancient art (1)

cuddly & cute, she ws bagged in suburban Linwood
a month later – she refused to answer any questions
or to take a lie detector test & while in the can
she became friendly with a young married woman

           the eyes are the windows of the soul
           & thru them the spirits may enter into & animate
           the lifeless limbs of modern man

who was doing time for auto manslaughter,
she was only twenty – Barbara wanted her to get
a man who could fix an alibi but Donna tipped
the screws & avoided getting extra time for sodomy

           ordinarily when questioned the eyes are turned
           briefly to the side opposite their most activated
           cerebral hemisphere

meanwhile True wanted to turn State’s evidence
& Santo hired an ex-con to enter the crowded courtroom
to spalsh him with napalm, roasting him alive
but Judge Fricke fixed him with troopers & detectives

           the reptile brain is still intact in the head;
           the limbic node, it is a horseshoe-shaped organ
           located in the base of the skull

then Sirianni got on the stand & told that he
had been offered twenty-five grand to make
the alibi & introduced a note which showed
the defendant entertaining an abnormal affection
      for her cell-mate

           the cortex was simply wrapped around it
           & functioned in two modes: sexual & ferocity -
           the switch could be detected in the mobility
                of the face

& even as it was going on the record,
Barbara’s voice, sharp with anger & hurt
lashed across the courtroom:
did they even have to read that?

           the reptile brain has no ferocity:
           it simiply fights coldly for survival
           while the mammal brain engenders a sense
                of community

"hi baby -your note was so sweet
i want you honey but we shouldn’t
start anything we couldn’t stop
or let ourselves fall in too deep"

           an outer eight inches of new braind
           covers the mammal bulk – the neo-cortex
           is incredibly complicated

then she recalled that she had been home
with hubby Graham who said before
that he was with his mother
but subsequently found his memory refreshed

           curiously the new brain seems to have been
           created for problems more complicated than
           those it is now being used for

she walked the last walk with
her shapely body stuffed in a skintight
beige dress, long earnings dangled,
her lips werer painted crimson

           phote: 1955 – Barbara sobs
           as she kisses hand of her third child
           Tommy, in Los Angeles County jail

1. The use of this quotation as well as many of the ideas in this poem is by courtesy of Robert Bly.

Erin St. Mawr
Middlebury, Vermont

american dream

twist off
my rubber neck love
resealable, but not rehealable.
teflon tradegy
a new innovation in cleansing emotions
mine, yours.
scrape me into the trash masher
crying saran wrap tears
on a garbage can curb.
hurting, like a brillo pad dance
across a crusty vegetable
dinner dream.
by now
your ivory white dishes
have dripped dry
and the meal is forgotten.
what’s for dinner
tomorrow night?

Randy Schultz
Santa Monica, California

1964

I was in my treehouse
patching this or fixing that
or hammering down another board
using twenty-four nails
before I got one to go
all the way in without bending
Sometimes we would leaf through
the shagy remains of a Playboy
staring at the thighs and
stiff nipoples
And when the bigger kids came by
the place would smell like
stale tobacco
I could hear my mother singing
from inside the house
One time I heard her yell
my name. I rushed in to
the smoky kitchen after
a quick oil fire in a frying pan
was already out
But my mother
held me tight in her arms
I wanted to go back outside
but she held me tight in her arms
and repeated my name, softly
Her apron smelled like
fried chicken

Randy Schultz
Santa Monica, California

Shopping

She sits among the magazine covers
trying to look like the April issue
hoping he’ll mistake her for the Noxzema girl
He leans on the thin-worn soles of
Salvation Army tennis shoes wishing
he had a skinny mustache like Clark Gable
She tries hard not to look too interested
too ready, too lonely
He reaches for the latest Time
and wishes his life were more fiction than fact
She notices the way the corners of his eyes
watch her, stroke her
He sees her HOT STUFF t-shirt
and the way her bare nipples push
against the white cotton, gasping for air
She notices the lumps in his pants
are in the right places
He picks up Sports Illustrated, brushing
against her, softly
Theri eyes meet, lock in silence
She looks away quickly, then back
An embarrassed smile
rolls over both faces like a salty wave
They both stand, drenched
He asks her name

Randy Schultz
Santa Monica, California

BULLY

Now
with a cast-iron rage
forged
from fouler foundries

I could chew him up
and spit him out

but when we were kids
I’d walk around him
or he’d beat me
black and blue

that scarred battler
of rumbles
laughing at things
that made me want
to cry.

Nicky Selditz
Los Angeles, California

Justice

Ceasing for the moment,
his urgent business of grooming,
the monkey squints out through
the bars, finds his world
encircled by two-legged giants,
stuffing themselves with candies,
hot dogs, ice cream, tonics,
leering, pointing, jeering.
Angered, mortified, he swings
by his tail, clutches the bars,
steadies himself, spits out.
Spectators scatter, retreat,
abandoning hot dogs, ice creams,
candies, cold drinks.
The monkey, appeased, resumes his
urgent business, having equated
his own disdain
to his ego’s satisfaction.

Harry B. Sheftel
Washington, D.C.

Verisimiltude

As a mountain lion
crouches on a crag, intense,
silent, still, only a minute swish
of his tail stirs a bit of dust,
betrays his concentration.
I focus carefully, break no
stillness, for I would have
my film portray the primiitiveness
of his stance, the grief in his
unblinking eyes, etch in each
taut muscle, each unsheated claw.
I have a powerful regret
as I take my pictures,
for I must excise bars, and
superimpose a forested mountain
to give some verisimiltude.

Harry B. Sheftel
Washington, D.C.

Alice’s Cafe

this cafe
is run by a new breed of cat in the street

they serve hair
with the wheaties

you select in the corner:
drop a dime in,
get a wrold’s record–

the old man was telling me
just yesterday
you get serviced at this cafe

by a nice girl from town
with nothing more thriling
than to service

she slices her fingers for you
with the pie

wear Levi’s! come on out!

this cafe
has a fly-stunning fan
somebody lost the paint
somebody ran out on her husband

come on out!
we got rowboats in back!

the flooor of this cafe
was once used as a checker board
now there’s a farmer’s nose in the handkerchief

the menus ar published with stains
porterhouse steak: three ninety stain

outside this cafe
the highway runs into a city
killing the cook

we got picnic tbles!
swings for the kids!
make your own paper airplanes!

Joseph Somoza
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Where They Don’t Belong

Sudden gut hump
Ride road machine
Over bone.
Bump you squirm
Marrow thud.

I didn’t even
What was a
Goddam dog
Doing in the
Middle of.

Lurch
Crippling yelp
Flailling limb
Where
They don’t
Belong.

David Sterry
Portland, Orgeon

NEW YORK SUBWAY HAIKU (or Close to One)

Dark
bump-bump-ratt-le
to nowhere
Land of Nod Mongolia,
newsprint-glued bodies
steel eyelids
stock market’d
murderdeath-choked
closing
soporific,

till suddenly
doors opening
& walking
in:

a Chinese mother
holding the hand
of her 5 yr. old
boy…

   his fullround
ivory moon face,
twin-jewel
black jade eyes
star-twinklewinking
flashing

* * * A sea horse
Peking
over the edge
of a
white cloud

Irving Stettner
New York, New York

WINTER FELL AROUND US

Winter fell around us in wide white flakes,
and we woke early,
alerted by the quiet
of the gray morning,
awoke before our fathers and grandfathers
took to the walks armed with shovels
and brooms and small thick sacks of salt,
before our mothers and grandmothers
took to the kitchen to cook snow breakfasts
of pancakes and eggs and sausage,
coffee and hot chocolate.
We sat watching the radio for signs,
listeningt to the smooth voices
reporting the closing of schools,
first in the rural areas, small towns,
circling us, words coiming closer,
until, all our senses tipped,
the day was announced ours,
and we dressed quickly.

Stiff at elbows and knees and neck from knitted things
we set out against a cold
only parents and other relatives were aware of.
The sink of the boot step,
the jump from the front steps,
and we followed the first packed tracks up 50th Street
to the corner,
circled back to the edge of the white lawn
where we paused in awe,
mounted our paints and piintos
and galloped ourselves
a corral.
And then we made small angels,
arms flapping at our sides,
and, rolling,
traced strange paths across the snow,
happy as it clung to our clothes.
Delighting in the secrets of camouflage,
we lay watching slow-moving cars.

Then up and mittens off,
we began foming the soul,
round and hard,
carefully packed,
and when we held it ready in our hands
we paused again
as God might have paused at the beginning,
wondering at the possibilities of creation.
And then we fell to our knees
to rall and pack,
roll and pack again
as the body grew under our stiff hands
until it was ready
to stand by the bare branches of the lilac bush,
and we stood it there
because we remembered the lavender,
remembered the lavender against the snow.
And then we began again,
a second ball to rest upon the first,
then, quickly, the third,
our eyes rushing ahead to coal
and carrot and Grandma’s apron
which, when we tied it into place,
pleased us,
and we stood back admiring
ourselves and her,
skirt flapping against imagined legs.
And sometimes passersby,
noses red and great gusts of breath on their lips,
stopped and admired, too,
before continuing their journey up Capitol Avenue.
And then our hands,
suddenly numb,
signaled lunch,
and there was a great stomping and shaking
as we entered, unwrapped ourselves,
pressed our hands against warm sides.
Steaming bowls stood waiting
beside hot toast and melted peanut butter,
and we ate with a passion
for taaste, for odor,
chunks of peanut butter as welcome
as the snow had been.

And then the afternoon was imminent.
Dry socks pulled out of drawers,
mittens from radiatiors,
boots pulled on and buckled,
and we seet out again,
this time with warnings of overdue.
Snow tracked by boots, lined with work paths,
pavement stung by salt,
we turned away to build forts
we never quite completed,
turned away from each other,
forning troops against cousins and friends,
and under the watchful eye of our snow Grandma,
and the eye of the too-soon sun,
we stockpiled snowballs,
unitl the first flew free from our fingers
signalling the start of battle,
our sure aim decreasing
as arms tired
and eyes tired
and we fell silent behind our forts
and lay against the warm snow
thinking of oranges and blackboards,
hopscotch and sawhorses,
moving from one to the other
like an old jeweler
touching daimond and sapphire,
only the touch important.
Then we wanted no more of snow
and cold things,
and we rose together.

Boots heavy,
we went inside
frogetting the day
as though we had been hurt by it.
And we were sent outside again
for Grandma’s apron
and we kicked our forts to rubble
and sometimes we kicked each other
or hit wildly until
crimson startled us from noses
as it hit like a warm heavy flake on the snow.
And sometimes there was wailing,
not because we were hurt
but because we were not hurt enough,
causing us to walk quite separately home
where it was safe,
nd we could sit by ourselves
and have no thoughts at all
until supper was ready.
We ate without tasting,
looking forward to evening sounds
of television, the rattling of the evening paper,
of dishes being stacked and put away.

Mary Kathryn Stillwell
New York, New York

FIT HEAVEN

I always walk at her pace, slow,
mouse-footed, my mother
dressed in the same black wool coat
summer and winter since the war:
mother who tends the goldfish,
turns oiut the last light at night
saying "son, son" like a father,
"your condition. . . condition."
and walks the mile to the grocery
like today– so hot that lizards heave
in the shade under stones, heat
tremblihng from the concrete in blue waves,
and all for a watermelon, one watermelon!

Always I walk at her pace, slow,
bending now almost to her shoulders,
carrying the watermelon like a dumb,
stuffed doll nestled awkwardly
between my arms, past the filling station
whjere the attendant gawks at us
behind sunglasses and baseball cap,
mother holding onto my arm– old midget
and ugly oaf pair shuffling past
the miniature golf course, Dairy Queen;
weird troupe of shadows smothering back there
inside that display window– and I smell
something burning as we walk
through the noon heat, cow bones
bleaching out on the prairie,
a loud buzzing through the highwires,
every throat tasting dust
when the melon explodes a million
rivers of pink flesh and birdseed,
and I fall headfirst, skull
smackiong concrete in a fit of dog-yelp
and scream, spinning round, kicking
like a frog staked to an ant bed,
each second a spasm of ice
and blast furnace until all the crows
in the world blackout the sky,

and I’m numb and needle-stuck,
crawling over cold stone, a voice
drifts through the forest in monotones
"home. . . home. . ." a heaven of worm-nerve
and wasp-jerk. . . blue. . . clouds–
her voice leaps in shock waves,
where the sky splits open she’s standing
in the middle of the sun, a cross,
a black-feathered body blowing in wind
and silence.

Rawson Tomlinson
Pine, Colorado

THE TORNADO

The tornado killed 27 people at the supermarket
When the walls blew out and part of the roof
Settled on top of them

I was in a cellar
With my grandmother who was praying
Though I was thinking mainly
Of caressing the girl who lived across the street

(only she was in that supermarket)

Robert Vander Molen
Grand Rapids, Michigan

I’M FIVE

I’m five. All day
I’ve wanted to be
with grandpa. He’s been
sleeping in the parlor.
His bed is big,
and he’s got powder
on his cheeks. Someone’s
dumped a lot of flowers
at his feet. Everyone
speaks in a whisper.
But not the aunt who wears
the floppy hat – she sighs
and eats. Her hankie is a wad
of toilet paper. The neighbors
bring more pies and cakes.
An uncle tells paps
that grandpa’s rich. I hope
everybody goes home
when grandpa wakes. I don’t
like my stiff shirt collar
and shoes that squeak.
I can’t go out today.
I’ve got to stand by the window
and wait. The aunt who smokes
a million cigarettes begins
to cry when a long black car
comes up the drive. Grandpa’s
not going away. Someone
wants his big bed
and the flowers. I’m five.

John Stevens Wade
Mt. Vernon, Maine

LETTERS

They skid into the mail slot with a dull thud.
I get enough of them every year to shingle a roof.
They are shaped like razor blades in Halloween apples,
and my name is accusingly fixed on everyone that comes.

I am always the demolition expert at my address –
each postmark is checked for traces of a terrorist.
I look for mucilage poisoning behind the stamps of presidents,
and all commemoratives are searched for signs of dynamite.

To think that I once foolishly expected them to announce
the lucky number in the sweepstakes of love,
the questionnaire that guaranteed the instant millionaire,
and that insurance payment for my busted imagination!

But the letters I hate most are those from old friends.
The long fuse of language is a booby trap of demands.
I could have a gaveyard if I stuck my letters int he ground.
I could plant them and watch my diaappointments grow thick as postage.

John Stevens Wade
Mt. Vernon, Maine

TOMATOES

This morning when I tried to remember
how my puppy-loving heart stumbled
crazily, and how the noon tilted
my racing pulses, I was interrupted

by the telephone. My next-door neighbor
wanted to know if hen manure would burn
his tomatoes. I told him that green hen manure kills.
He seeemed to understand the laws of potency,

and I wished him well. So I got back
to that dumpling girl and my hugged pillow
of yesteryear — her breasts rising like yeast
as I twisted and turned in the burning sheets.

But, once more the telephone shrieked. It was tomatoes
again. Should he sprinkle them with ashes
or chance the dangers of pesticides? I told him
to poison them. He was grateful, and so was I:

I got back to my skidding blood and caught breath.
My darling’s tongue ripened upon the cradled vine
of my arm, and I weeded buttons from her blouse.
She uprooted her skirt, and I shook down

my pants. But first there was that ringing telephone
to answer — another call from my apologetic neighbor.
This time it was sunshine and water. I told him
both were potent and beneficial to growing plants.

John Stevesn Wade
Mt. Vernon, Maine

INDIAN /IN D END

In d end
this man Jefferson
wrapped in the black aesthetic
arms of Sally
disremembered the Indian
beyond the range of his high mounted cello
and in d end
babbled in his burning blanket,
babbled in his gemlike flames.

In d end
Washington
undermined by a French disease
disremembered the Indian
and his Martha,
in d end, his Martha
who couldn’t come
on this wonderful morning
for all his kissing her.

Indian, in d ending
I arrange a rage
against the founding
godfathers and all their tribe
who will buy
dynamite and barter bullets
to genocide Indians in d end,
to genocide Indians in d end
and indeed to steal deeds
signatured in blood older than creation.

In d end
Wisconsin will sin
like Woodrow Wilson
and for the last Maine fool
hymning the bloody-brained Nixon blues
I, black Indian, in d ending
I arrange a fit revenge,
for tthe fire thiws time
will be the final ending
of disremembering
and I shall never
wound my knee
with kneeling in prayer,
for the fire this time
will be the ending of disremembering
the millions of disremembered Indians
in d end.

Jerry Ward
Tougaloo, Mississippi

Temporal Gulch

At Roundup we
pass the drunken tourists, at eight o’clock
still asleep on the picnic tables
beneath the silver live oaks,
the garbage pit, a storm at rest,
and disppearing into the trailhead
step out of our metaphors,
stretch up toward the horizon, a hand on the ridge,
past the girls thrown down from cliffs,
curled up in the mistletoe, abandoned
weeks ago by their toothy boyfreinds, and keep on going
right over the top where years ago
three Boy Scouts died bewildered in a blizzard.
beyond is the other side of the kiss:
all morning we keep going down, down,
legs and fingers growing light and thin
as violins burning back to their strings,
meeting only wooden Joshua coming up in his rags,
his vision the sun and moon standing still,
until at noon rejoicing we also
take our useless clothes off,
layer after layer of wrinkled silver wrap, see
our tattoos, fish escaping fromour flesh
as we stoop over the sandy spring, striding
through the slumping Mormon cabins, rotten corrals,
the abandoned art of porcelain washbasins,
the long-leaf pines, Apache maidens in the myth
singing to the sky, to emerge from the boulders
at the bottom, the key in our hand
a clean gun, the golden bone plucked from our legs
to pry out Chuck, that baby doctor
who drove for days to pick us up,
asleep in his smashed car.

Peter Wild
Tucson, Arizona

AUTUMN AT CAPE ANN

in the Seaside Cemetery
at PigeonCove
a band of boys
played football
beyond headstones
toward Atlantic waves
the far field they raced
cleared to take
new dead expected
in rows ranged
back from the road
old markers at the gate
growing newer
each furrow toward
white water
breaking on brown rocks
edging that lawn
shouts of get him
hold on
touchdown
in some space
waiting for each one
not thinking
it made any difference

Howard Winn
Poughkeepsie, New York

ECLECTIC COMPANY

at eighty-three my mother
said
she wished to read
Plato
or Ariostotle
at last
she had alweays meant to
she said
but she had
ben so very
busy
but I know St. Paul
well she
said
although
it would ne instructive
to know
something of the classics
too
but my eyes tire easily
and maybe
it isn’t
necessary
by now
or isn’t
something
I will
use
although
it appears
at eighty-three
Christianity
isn’t quit
enough

Howard Winn
Poughkeepsie, New York

DRAPE

Drape, she said, as she nudged me,
your arm around my shoulders
and keep me warm.
Soon, I’ll get as hot as
that Lucky Strike draping
from the side of your mouth,
the smoke rising rising
in rings like you see
in those Bogart flicks.

We were on her couch
watching The Grapes of Wrath
on the Late Show.

                   There was Henry Fonda,
                   draping a tarp
                   over a truckload of furniture,
                   spare tires, chicken wire, and dusty children.
                             And that tarp
                             draped and flapped
                             as they rolled across the plains,
                                     a cloud of dust behind them
                                     that from a distance seemed
                                     to drape along the parched ground.

Lavender drapes draped over two picture windows
that faced a red brick wall.
She lived in Houston and I heard
liked to poke fun
at West Texas boys like me.
                                                If one looked up,
draping his head outside the window and screwing
his neck to the limit, he could see
telephone lines draped against the night sky.

When the Late Show was over,
we moved together and finished
before the Star-Spangled Banner cut off.
Her eyebrows sort of draped
in half circles above her
long false eyelashes.

I dreaped my red bandanna
on the radio antenna.
It flapped all the way back to Abilene.

David Yates
New Braunfels, Texas

B
4
U
tri
2
run
the
whirl,
w(awe)k
thee
yoon
uv
urth.

Larry Ziman
Los Angeles, California

Edited/Published by Larry Ziman
Copyright 1979 by Larry Ziman
Library of Congress Catalog Number: 78:68653
ISBN: 0-9333456-01-8
ISSN: 0163-3295
Printed in the United States of America
First Printing: June, 1979

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The cover picture ‘The Feast’ is copyrighted 1978
by Larry Weiss, San Clemente, California

‘vanilla custard’ by Morgan Alexander first appeared
in Floating Island, Spring 1976

& BEFORE THAT’ by Michael Andrews first appeared in
Stonecloud, #7, 1978, copyright 1978 by Pacific Perceptions, Inc.

‘jane mccrowley, my’ by Cynde Gregory is reprinted
by permission of Washout Review, copyright 1978 by Washout Review

‘THE BULLET HOLES IN MY LEFT LEG’ by John Harris appears
in his book Against The Day Of The Dead , published by Momentum Press,
copyright 1977 by John Harris

‘City Skip’ by Michael Leigh is reprinted
by permission of Seven Stars Poetry

‘PRINCESS HOLLYWOOD AND THE VAGABOND’ and ‘YOU FLOAT DOWN MY EYES’
by Doren Robbins first appeared in One Mind #2, copyright 1977 by John Solt

THE WHOREHOUSE by F.N. Wright is published by the Young-Davis Press,
copyright 1977 by F.N. Wright

vanilla custard

once when i was very small i tasted vanilla custard it was
the best custard i had ever eaten and enid and her father
Myron and i went to willow grove park and he took us on
the roller coaster and i wore a yellow sunsuit with blue
ducks on it and i dribbled the custard all over myself that
was half the fun and i loved enids father and one spring
during the war he built a fence around their house all by
himself and he bought me a big vanilla custard and he killed
himself the summer i was ten i was away at camp and my parents
didn’t tell me until i got home late in august he died at the
age of thirty three and i cried for a long time and i was
angry at my parents for hiding the truth from me. i did
understsand. death is for children too.

and i still think of enid shes the first person i can
remember knowing and now i cant find her and i still look
for the vanilla custard it would really be a lie to say id
given up the notion of ever finding it in fact i look all
the time whenever i go to an amusement park or smell a certain
smell or recognize a face reminiscent of that place way back
there once upon a time in my footed pajamas where every smell
was soap and every taste was vanilla custard and i don’t tell
anyone that that’s what im looking for only i know and now
you know that i look in chocolate éclairs and rice pudding and
cup custrard and frozen custard and bavarian crème filled donuts
and boston cream pie and french vanilla ice cream and
tapioca pudding and i cant let go of it.

and i know im lying to myself i wouldn’t recognize it if i
did find it it was so long ago i cant even be sure now it
ever really happened and still i keep looking its
not even the custard anymore its just something something else
i lost when i was four.

Morgan Alexander
Venice, California

& BEFORE THAT

yesterday
old david
ran his fingers
thru his long gray beard
& died
he said
–all i ever did was survive
the day before that
he was feeding
french fries to the gulls
& said
he was feeling fine
ten years before that
he went on a 3 month
camping trip
& when he came back
he talked less
the day before he left
he buried Helen
four days before that
she said
she regretted nothing
8 years before that
he closed down
the office supplies store
& retired
40 years before that
he opened up an art gallery
they planned to make enough
to retire to someplace exotic
with beaches & palms
& eternal sun
2 months before that
he married Helen
the year before that
he was on his way
to bum around the world
he could not sleep nights
listening to the calliope
of restless stars
the day before that
he graduated
with a degree in law
he told his father
he would never practice
15 years earlier
he told his grandfather
he was going to be
a mountain climber
when he grew up
3 years before that
he said he would never
grow up
the day before that
his mother told him
the truth
about santa claus
& the easter bunny
4 years before that
his aunt Bessie
cast his horoscope
& said
he would be a success
In life
marry 3 times
become a famous painter
& die rich
in a foreign land
the day before that dr. Anderson
pulled him from the wsomb
slapped him on the ass
& he screamed

Michael Andrews
Hermosa Beach, California

Stumbling Franz

Sunday was a broken day

without rest

caged in your bed long-widowed
you called Franz for aid

without rest

as a young bride you’d giggled
remembering before marriage
you’d had a surrey horse
the family dubbed Stumbling Franz

without memory

the grooves in your mind
brought carpet paths that now
you could not find

without paths

we took you from your home
to a Rest Home a home

without rest

Beatrice Bechtol
Los Angeles, California

the headdress of our romance

the prints are barely open
to the door of your bed
geese flew from the last storm,
feathered icicles threading
old uncomfortable sounds
over slaughtered heads and tender wings;
the phone rings in hysterical laughter
stomach to mouth but no one moves
as night gapes as far as a prisoners nostrils
trying to untwine sound with smell;
freight cars pull in to freeze
in the bloody piss of hobo;
the neighborhood is on the hinges
of a bald white pawnshop
fingering its last key.
all hands are down to zero;
the razor is king
the razor is a a fit president
the razor is slave to no one but the user
it is a kit that frees the insane.
the night is into another circle
as an old lady leaves thru the pockets of rain
and braids the moon to kitchen sink
fortune has a wet excuse for falling;
the razor blues in on
the edge of mirrors & smiles
making warm death marks.
no piece of flesh is alone
since it has another bastard piece;
quick puzzles are made in seconds
from the whole slab that once walked
on the trail of rich stories;
now all beginnings are dim
all endings are tubular and in the frames of boxes,
yellow degrees on yellow designs.
this girl of twenty-nine
in the silver of too many bouquets
flirts with a dozen blue sisters of gas
counting on her fingers barely warm—
the numb foil of solvent years to come.
at forty she’ll court twelve sisters of red
opening coaches to Canterbury & reason by then
that it is not worth wondering.
her table is a knight
her dresser, loud voices on palace floors
that make drifts on her bed.
later there is the atom in pill box
closer to my form as nightwatchman
opening clams of universal spit;
the gems of many gardens touch my head
into an atlas, a journeybook,
but the crows rob me;
the flies eat from my secret passages;
the bees spy on me thru magic glasses;
the ants trip me up and send me to court
for mistreating animals;
i drop my teachers tongue
as several worms fight a new liquid;
an angel breaks up the kitchen;
the devil snores in the dictionary
& sleeps until noon
as this woman fucks a lily
& excites a herd of goats in wooly sweaters.
it is time to thatch the roof
and let the dimestore sun dial out
the terrible dreams.
there is energy in the rocfking chair;
we watch the old lady paint glasses
a raw red, developing the odor of hell;
in the thickets grasshoppers digest
the gardeners lies.
i part your teeth into cues
and cubes of bad water
and feature your latest prison
as a forty-ightr hour cartoon
on not living. you begin to grow in bed;
your blanket has become your digestive system;
your veins puff up the pillow;
there is screaming in your attic brain
that is twelve feet of blackness,
hooves ride across the red eye of cartoon;
all winking is hidden by bushes
planted over the old lady’s patchwork
of nettled webs.
a river begins at her feet
& opens your toes;
all of lifes traitors appear;
the cast is in intricate masks of japanese prints,
each word in a bamboo shoot.
i lower the curtain below your eyes;
pot holes sink in the enamel of our bones
as you dress up in your second head
for the animated finale;
i toss my coat into the fur of your lips
and you blend a new thread of fire.

guy r. beining
Brooklyn, New York

NON-MARRIAGE RITES IN THE GHETTOED SUBURB

Those starlings copulating in an elm
do not stay in the tree. They fall outside
before orgasm starts. The hapless sperm—
presumably—is dribbled far and wide.

The grasses down below care nothing much.
A squirrel digs among them, placidly
ignoring starlings. But the suburbs round
spawn analogues of dull lubricity

whereby a sexual beauty is reduced
to surreas of avian obscene
all acted out in cars and backyard lots
or fatly hinted on the TV screen.

For this the prophets and the soldiers died:
A snigger/snigger, an orgasm snatched
betimes—like instant coffee—on the run.
The humans and the starlings are well-matched.

John Bennet
Green Bay, Wisconsin

TV SPORT SPECTACULAR AT THE NEW OMNI-COLISEUM

The loveless boys of winter at their games
toy with hickory death while loud voyeurs
bounce bounce in spitling lust.
All rage for blood
hot on the shardy ice.
The crippled air,
squeezed tight by rubber/brick/and iron, fills
with stench that would have frightened Pavlov’s dogs
had Pavlov dreamed test-patterns so obscene.

Meanwhile, of course, the lobby cubicles
Bulge with sweaty coins and currency.

John Bennet
Green Bay, Wisconsin

black hair beaten
a face they called at
when she was young
her eyes were
always beyond the buildings and crowds

somewhere in her stride
there was a child
in 51
when she was young, 26
she had been a beat or whatever
they
were called, back then
for 10 years in New York
she rode buses

here, on a bus now
she begins to rummage her macramé carry all ‘
spotted with different yarns and strings
that hold
the original Victorian house design , its ropes
and blue stones
still seen
for what it was.

Dan Brady
San Francisco, California

the movie on 29/a farewell to arms

they were advertising war cards
on tv last night

the bigger one
double u double two

all the ordnance and enemies
hitler goering

bangalore torpedoes
b-29’s

iwo jima
“look at that flag!”

maps, charts, full color pictures
“ingenious filing system”

and I was reminded of this one card
in nam

who was always getting the clap
he was up tp fifteen penicillin shots

a real collector’s item

Jeff Branin
Woodbury, New Jersey

Vogelweh BOQ

After each game
he’d come home dead
tired and crawl into the stall
margrit would turn on the water
and take off their clothes
somehow he found the strength
to reach through the curtain
and across the toilet seat
to the knee high fridge and lift
two cold local brews. after a few
swallows he’d look in her warm
blue eyes and ask her to marry him.
she never did.

Jeff Branin
Woodbury, New Jersey

Lopez the proprietor

having blown the year’s savings
on one night of great fun
staring down the great road
from Tia Juanita to home

into the entrails of Baja,
empty unskinned abandoned
carcass

like himself leading
through windows of day dreams
the whistle of coyote laughter
even at noon leads through the
rosary at the neck

to death

& back out, he says, mumbling,
chewing his cheek, talking to
himself, someone perfectly sober

iIn the window of dreams thinking
the patient wife awake all night
will be silent

and thinking:
the cries in the straw beds might
be hens, might be the sobbing
of daughters as he arrives,

the dog with arthritic pain,
the 7-inch corn being gnawed
b y the burro, the screech of
corrugated roof expanding
in heat—

metal on metal.

Peter Brett
Ross, California

YULETIDE ON 9th ST.

manhattan is a surface
of intimate faces
at Christmas time
much too busy to notice the man
wrapped in burlap
on the corner
outside trude heller’s

if asked
he will tell how mild
the winter was in ‘65
or how bright it was
before the lights
went out that year

but mostly these days
he speaks of how warm
burtlap is
& the bouncing lights
of the liquor shop
acknowledge his presence

one of the few who knows
why rudolph’s nose is red
who santa claus really is
& why he stands
on the corner of 9th street
for hours & hours

but those who pass
an occasional quarter
never stop to hear
his ruptured wisdom
& the christmas lights
In rockefeller plaza
are much too far to warm
his freezing hands

so when his childhood
stalks him like some
long dead housecat
he dodges taxies
in the wet blue night
looking for christmas presents
that should have been there
a long long time ago

Stewart Brisby
Syracuse, New York

YEAR OF THE SNOWED-IN MOON

wolves pass silently
through dark trees
caribou move downwind
nothing is real the glass
bones of trees snap with
snow weight

the moon snowed in
has not once climbed
into the sky this year
the bewildered indians name
their children after the
moon paint their tepes &
war ponies with moon signs
the night one simple expanse
of black they cannot get used to

from this a legend grows
that a the moon has locked
herself into her black house
& becomea prisoner of grief
deer & caribou continue to
migrate to the sea where they
rush into the surf their eyes
bright with fear

the Indians fear
the loss of the moon
everything in their lives
has become off center
even the bloody sun that
climbs into the sky seems
off center & its light
has changed babies born under
a black night without a moon
in the light of stammering stars
are born idiots the last caribou
& deer drown in the sea the legend
grows

Steven Ford Brown
Birmingham, Alabama

SUNNY DAY SPECIAL
(serves one)

Ingredients:
1 human body
(your own body serves best)
1 mountain stream
with waterfall and pool
1 loud shout
1 burst of laughter
1 sunny day

Directions:
Plunge one human body
into icy cold pool.
Body must remain immersed
until lungs are ready to split.
Allow body to spring
Breaking the water’s surface
and emit one loud shout.
Collect concentric circles
as they can be used for
other dishes.
The body should then float
for a minimum of five minutes
or until saturated with the sensation
of nothing touching the skin
but water.
Before serving allow the body to emit
at least one burst of laughter
to drift within the air
through the sunlight and froth
of the waterfall.

Douglas Campbell
Tallahassee, Florida

GRANDFATHER

Story running through my childhood,
trapped by a cattle-guard,
gun in hand aimed
at the man who will kill you,
you are transformed
from ordinary forebear
whose name and face lingers
in unopened albums
into a legend of summer evenings
told by father to daugheter
in a flat land
bearing no resemblance
to your cottonwood mountains.

This single violent act
has made you memorable.
Nothing else is verified—
though it is said
you were always a wanderer,
children buried
in the places you left,
Texas, Oklahoma, New
Mexico Territory.

Your wife would only tell
her children
you were innocent when you died.
And they hung the man who shot you
so we may infer
your respectability, a victim of
terrible circumstance, but why
running like that, gun in hand,
grandfather, when they got you?

It doesn’t matter.
We don’t judge you
or know you or
really care.
But we remember you
and tell you
on childhood’s porches
until you have become
our Western Epic.

Joan Colby
Streamwood, Illinois

The Whisker Of Hercules

No woman’s hand ever pried
at that belt buckle
with its ambered scorpion; it was always
overshadowed by his belly;
and further above,
by a chin of whiskers. You might ask
where all cowboys go
when they run out of time or luck,
the trails that end
at the crimson lips of plateaus,
and you would know just to look at him
that he is one place neither
heaven nor hell
could anticipate this far west.

But the ancient moons of sweat tucked
in his armpits tell us
it is early June.
And it could be hell or Kingman, Az.
snce in a month the rodeo
will appear like the retread
of an old flatbed diesel parked
beneath the silanthus tree,
flaked rubber given way
to broken soil, but always turning
with memory of the earth. And in his pale

starry eyes you and I are always young
or seem to be. But those cowhide hands,
that bellowed cheek
with a drop of chew on the verge
of flight , and his breath
of Redman and rust-iron were always old.
His boots set down small crescents
to eventually fill
with water or dust or time,
and you bet your life he thinks of us.
But not nearly the way we want, or imagine.

The world is one big corral
through which a dusty-devil drags
its restless pillar of debris.
and against it he leans in his labors
like a displace myth
out of proportioin to the turmoil
around him. Truth is
none of us were ever young,
and this is the weight
he shoulders as a roan horse might,
suddenly frozen at the vista’s edge
with nowhere but down to go,
and the cowpoke in the saddle
just crazy enough to ride on.

Paul H. Cook
Salt Lake City, Utah

Late To Work

Uncle Bugs and Daffy
have hidden away my shoes.

They’ve been at it
daily for years,
though I’ve just begun.
The grown-up in the mirror
is fogged in, out of contact,

urgent messages fading
like geese drifting off
in a sky
blown full of polka dots.

So, whose hand is it that
pours the third cup of tea?
Whose feet hesitate
at the threshold?

Whose tie dangles
in its approximate noose?

Let the rest of the world
throw itself into gear—
I have this childhood
confessional to make
concerning wabbits.
So never mind the Boss
who sits behind his desk

smiling like it was duck-
hunting season.
Who cares if his name
is Elmer.
So what if he waits like death
in the reeds at dawn.

Paul H. Cook
Salt Lake City, Utah

FULL SPEED AHEAD

I saw myself (and you too, buddy)
in a dream of the future
with fewer teeth, shorter hair,
smaller muscles ,like lighter
weight hot rods of humans.
And we were not older men.
Looking around— nobody was.
It was better than Star Trek,
better than Star Wars because
we were there, whipping out
poems for trillions of readers.
You see, poetry will be
In vogue again— your book on
school desks, my chapbook on
the charts. We’ll be more famous
than KISS is to the cavemen;
of the Seventies. There’ll be
groupies packed around all
pneumatic tubes in case we should
pop oiut, kisd growing weightless,
orbiting our heads to catch
our attention— “Me!” “Me!”
“Over here, poets!” And like
Spaceships we’ll reach for
them endlessly, grin broadly
at each other across the
mania, perky as Malcom McDowells
facing al little of the old
in-out. We were, umm… we’ll be
Great when we grow up, pal.

Dennis Cooper
Los Angeles, California

MY GRANDMOTHER GROWS

I remember my grandmother
in her elegant fifties,
leaning above my toy bed, bent only
at the waist like Snow White.

Her best stories slipped a carousel
into my room. I rode all day
then fell asleep, to the rain
of her small feet in the hall.

For years I dressed her,
wrote letters increasingly
short and typed, and grew up.
Now she’s alone, so I’ve opened my doors.

Mornings she flails from sleep
like a drowning girl:
some prince should lean there
complying like a daydream.

Days she sits over cold coffee
or lies in the dark
or climbs the floors
stooped as if in a cave.

At nigbt I lead her into my room.
She tows the merry-go-round,
but now it is Xerox gray
and I drop right through it.

Dennis Cooper
Los Angeles, California

IT’S GETTING LATE EARLIER

where is this again
party for a poet who makes how much
and translates a little Chinese on the side

in one hour she reads two good poems
the rest should have been sent back
to the chef until they were cooked

now she’s sitting with her legs crossed
manuscripts on her lap
her right foot twists like a cobra

she smiles at everyone but me
i guess she reads her mail

when she leaves she shakes my hand
she digs her fingernails into my palm
she knows I’m tired of dynamite poets
hurricane poets bad poets and beautiful poets
who show a lot of leg and a lot of promise
with only tiny misprints of success to keep them honest

Franz Douskey
New Haven, Connecticut

AFTER BLAKE, AN ALL-NIGHT STAND

Tremendous eqauations disrupt the dreams
of famous mathematicians
and distract then among the grackles.
Likewise the sun condemns astronomers to stare
into craters that blaze in vacant lots.

Pity the scientists who learn too fast and fizz out
like shook bottles of soda pop.
Pity more the poet who feels
the faithful gather in bookstores,
then invisibly lift him high and laughing , then dissolve.

There’s no law against this witchcraft,
no one to stopper its drain on faith.
The physicists believe each other, so would I.
But look at this face that’s pasted on my window.
No matter who reads this, it’s him, or her, it hasn’t any sex,
though it bleeds where it should cry.

I’d say it was left by a god, but I’m no Blake,
No one knocks such metaphysical sense
into my skull these rainy nights….
Harvard’s “dark Satanic” science labs are busier than I’d like,
their trust is in low-discount textbooks.
I’d like to read them but

my eyes dangle on springs to my cheeks,
exploded like eggs
from a stubborn chicken.
Topologists, chemists, radiologists, botanists—-
the single cell defines the species.

Feel where we used to comb our hair, feel how empty
these drizzling nights seem,
our bookshelves tottering in the draft….
These damp meditations form male wombs—-
both men and women have them—-
from which lies like these are torn.

William Doreski
Cambridge, Massassachusetts

WASHING ROCKS
MADISON COUNTY, N.C.

Gabrielle Johanson
five & a half &
running with thistle
& sunflowers
down
to the spring
where I sat
told me all her secrets
breathless in a
boston accent
slipping
to a country whisper
said they
were for me&
yesterdau she kicked her cat.
Hard she said
& waited,
her soft arms around my neck
warm cheeks
lips
swallowtail eyes
reaching deeper
than these mountains
into me
her small hands cupped
with more water
than you could drink.
Ever.

Nadine Estroff
Atlanta, Georgia

Appointment in Samarra: J.F.K.-Kolombangara
Island, New Georgia Archipelago ( August, 1943)-
Dallas, Texas ( November, 1963 )

The dream was always the same.

In that
awful moment—
just before impact—
as the Japanese
destroyer “Amagiri” ( Heavenly Mist )
bore down
out of the
darkness
to slice in half
the fragile motor
torpedo craft ( PT 109 )
Death smiled,
and turned away
into the
night.

Later—
as the presidential motorcade
sped thru
downtown Dallas—
Death waited,
( on a grassy knoll )
come to keep
his
appointment in Samarra.

L.S. Fallis
Las Cruces, New Mexico

Intense Dude, Heavy Brother

Your mother worked the night-shift
at the phone company. Midnights
under the ice-melting lights
I heard her singing be-bop arias,
saw her winging our doors
like Loretta Young or an ageing figure skater
in her red angora hat
with pom-poms, sleigh bells.
She answered her calls "Darla Swank, here."
and told us about her son
the musician, who sounded about 32
with six wives & a kid to support
playing stranger in the night
weddings with Tony and The Spotlights.
She couldn’t have prepared me
for you, praying for groupies
to sprout in your path like shadows,
greeting women with tender kisses
saying great ass as they turned their backs.
Pausing like a setter at point
when a pretty woman passed       whispering stereo
"hey man, look                           pretending your bone knees
at that beauty                                churned to butter
hey, come here                         the dead worm in your pants
& lie down"                                      in rigor mortis.
Your guileless eyebrows ready,
aimed, fired with charm, so vain
you probably thin this poem’s about you,
shorthand vocabulary, proving what
as intense dude, heavy brother you were
able to lay the most cosmic & bizarre chicks
made me want to peel off your sequined
shirt & go to work on bare skin
scraping to see if there was anything
warm, anything red, anything
with a strong taste underneath.
Last week I saw you walking
your kleptomaniac eyes
on their long leash.
You told me your new band’s name
& that it had evgerything
to do with the charisma of Christ,
pineal gland, third eye, and American Indians.
As your hand sincerely devoured mine, I remembered
the way you’d eat everyone’s food
then say "You weren’t saving that
or anything, were you?", remembered
the "artistic" poster in your room:
a single breast, fingers pulling the nipple
like someone trying to pluck a crouton
froma saucer of warm milk,
and laughter lashed from my throat
more my own
than any hate
I’d improvised with you.

Alice Fulton
New York, New York

Sestina For Janis Joplin

You called the blue’s loose black belly lover
and in Port Arthur they called you pig-face.
The way you chugged booze straight without a glass,
your brass-assed language, slingbacks with jeweled heel,
proclaimed you no kin to their muzzled blood.
no chiclet-toothed Baptist boyfriend for you.

Strung-out, street-hustling showed men wouldn’t buy you.
Once you clung to the legs of a lover,
let him drag you till your knees turned to blood,
mouth hardened to a thin scar on your face,
cracked under songs, screams, never left to heal.
Little Girl Blue, soul pressed against the glass.

That voice rasping like you guzzled fibber-glass,
stronger than the four armed men behind you.
But a pale horse lured you, docile, to heel:
warm snow flakes pillowed you like a lover.
Men feared the black holes in your body and face,
knew what they put in would return as blood.

Craving fast food ,cars, garish as fresh blood,
diners with flys and doughnuts under glass,
formica bars and a surfer’s gold face,
in nameless motels, after sign-off, you
let T.V.’s blank bright stare play lover,
lay still, convinced its cobalt rays could heal.

Your songs that sound ground under some stud’s heel,
swallowed and coughed up in a voice like blood:
translation unavailable, lover!
No prince could shoe you in unyielding glass,
stories of exploding pumpkin bored you
who flaunted tattooed breast and hungry face.

That night needing a sweet-legged sugar’s face,
a hot, sky-eyed Southern comfort to heal
the hurt of senior proms for all but you,
plain Janis Lyn, self-hatred laced your blood.
You knew they worshipped drained works, emptied glass,
legend’s last gangbang, the wildest lover.

Like clerks we face your image in the glass,
suggest lovers, as accessories, heels.
“It’s your shade, this blood dress,” we say. “It’s you.”

Alice Fulton
New York, New York

Sex With Someone Who Resembles Hemingway, Disguised

As Freud, of course
plowing through
a tunel barely
wide enough
slippery as wet
rock but soft
from all the kittens
stuffed inside
with a heart cross-tied
at the far end
like a chestnut pony.
I am so full of animals!
Tonight when he enters
I pretend I’m not at home
so he puts them on
my scent.
They have just trailed
the tunnel and emerged
onto a promontory where
they can go no further
without collapsing
the bridge. At this point
the animals rear and wail
to me, doing their best
elephant imitations.
He cries toro! and rallies
them with a red flag.
They feel me coming
long before and start to
leap like puppies:
25 housecats
a sorrel pony
and he.

Alice Fulton
New York, New York

Sheets

Hell, she spilled her fifth highball on the sheets.
Old muslin sheets worn thin as raw egg white.
Well, she’d make ghost costumes fro trick or treat;
Bandages, dustrags, from them before night.
When her husband in clay-stained clothes came home,
Smelled gin, saw stained laundry obscene in the hall,
Called her bitch, whore, hating her liquored drone,
Smashed her hidden bottle against the wall.
Then punch-drunk but avenged, swallowed his yells
Like baby crocodiles siphoned down drains.
Contritely cracked new sheets like crisp egg shells,
Broke, baptised on the bed, sheets like champagne,
       Distilled rare chablis from tears that she’d cried
       While she hung his damp screams outside to dry.

Alice Fulton
New York, New York

Gifts

After years like these, you might have expected
the sharp crack of pine snapping under my feet, not
a room such as this
where the days glance in off the gritted brick and
the words again fall from each new page, as though
they had gone unwillingly
by this dim light at which I an stationed. Yet
all is not lost. The keys
do sometimes drop into place, and tonight,
with tight hands gone quite vacant, I gaze out
across the courtyard and see her
in her well-lit room, the sheet soft about
her waist and thevbasin balanced on her thighs,
As she bends slightly forward
to slowly wash her breasts
with the sweet oil that I gave her.

Roger Gaess
Washington, Connecticut

A LESSON OF NIGHT

Deep in the shadows of your room
where even the moon is a stranger,
you play your flute again
in front of the little cage.

You have heard of Haydn’s parrot,
of how in the night
when all senses were void of their office
except for the sense of sound,
a captured bird was taught a human tune.

But the tiny finch behind your bars
only listens to the breath inside your flute,
only hears your fingers fly again tonight.

Your sound is clear and full
of everytinig you want from him.
But this room, this little cage
does not give back your tune
no matter how dark it may be.

Charles Ghigna
Homewood, Alabama

YOU AND THE LADY WITH THE HAT

We try to overlook the distance
that sits between us
like a lady with a hat,
but every time we stand, she stands.

Charles Ghigna
Homewood, Alabama

UNCLE JOHN

You were the gent in the
the three piece suit and straw hat
who came unannounced from Rochester
and wouldn’t knock on our back door
or ring the bell
you sat in your car
sometimes past sunset
until we walked out and
discovered you with our amazed faces
or until a neighbor phoned us
about a strange man
wandering about our yard

you ate dinner with us those nights
and sucked your teeth through tea
as you told stories about your fajnily
and the job you almost had

later I crept into my mother’s bed
because you were arguing
with ghosts
in the room across the hall
and I couldn’t sleep

mother said you were an old man
those were your prayers
but I knew different

I knew how angry
you must have been
the first time and every time
you walked into a room
and found them staring at you:
your dead mother, dead sisters
uninvited, stupidly waiting
to be found

Margaret Griffith
Chadron, Nebraska

jane mccrowley, my

mother’s cousin’s mother’s aunt
you were a hard one to figure

they say you drifted
from room to room
your hands
two breathing angels
blessing the wash
of mud curled
like a hesitant kitten
in the corners of stained
glass windows

blessing the fierce
jaws and carved brown teeth
of the pride of lions
which crouched beneath the couch
and
the furry eyebrowed ancestors
necks craned like bald birds
your hands blessed and blessed
two breathing angels
wings demurely folded
waiting
mad

as a spring day in December
you never opened your mouth
to talk except
once right in the middle of
great grandfather’s funeral you
started to chatter like a monkey
saying
first there’s nothing, then
the vines slither and the leaves
pop out pop in and out
in the middle there’s a pumpkin
big orange thing
and then you shuddered
into silence

and one other time, my
mother’s cousin told me
she came upon you
stone asleep in
your moon-soaked room
an old woman
lost in a white shapeless gown
singing
in your sleep
like a bird

Cynde Gregory
Albany, New York

down & out in apartment 5-d

the apartment looks
like a junk yard,
crumpled rejection slips & beer cans
scattered over the floor like wrecked cars.
my poems grow anemic & pale.
sometimes late at night
they cry.
i’ve lost thirty pounds
just on submissions.
i’m so small
i can slip through a keyhole
& pick up the mail.
each day the mailman
gets thinner
& thinner
as he walks down the street
& disappears
into a crack in the sidewalk.
i pick him up
like a toothpick,
stick him between my teeth
& bite so hard
he can’t deliver
anymore rejection slips.

Jan E.M. Haas
New York, New York

RED CURRENTS

i feel numb
only the sound
of jet engines
high over Pittsburgh
i’m afraid
talking to myself
about us
into the void
at the trieste café in frisco
you & i talked about our future
the quilt we slept under
at our first apartment on strathmore road
the drive north through big sur
the fluorescent waves
san simeon
early mornings
much coffee
i walk ainlessly
and watch the sun break
between boston skyscrapers
i feel red currents swelling inside
the day ending
i remember the july morning
you wanted out
now I want only to watch you
blow-drying your shortened hair
brushing your teeth
putting make-up on
as you keep pace with your early morning ritual
i remember you
framed by an easterly faced window
adorned with plants at a place once our own
considering my irishness
i apologize
i can still hear you saying
no one ever hit my heart so hard

Philip Hackett
Boston, Massachusetts

RELINQUISHING

She let him go
like a lost wallet
containing many things –
nothing irreplaceable.

She let him go
on his fact-finding mission
for God –
askew
in his particular way,

stuck for hours at a time
staring not over or through
his glasses’ frames
nor quite at the floor,

wandering off to scrutinize
the God-discovering potential
in a dime store:

the odor he fancied
obliquely sacramental,
the toys, balloons and balls,
the plastic smell
and whiff of cosmetics
grainy in the air.

Through inhaling this
subtle tragedy spirirualized
in mercanile vapors,
he said he was drawn upward.

She let him go
like a burial at sea –
how very sad. What relief.
She’d miss him so.
She hoped he’d sink.

At first he said
his research would take shape
in a diagram.
“A Deity blueprint?” she said.
He smiled but looked concerned.

Later she found him
tinkering with math.

She let him go like fireworks,
a roman candle or shooting star,
lit him off and hoped
he’d explode.

He undertook to do sketches
in the dark.
Sometimes he would
stand on his head
or hold his breath.

He brought home holy men
arrived from overseas,
their gesticulating translators,
professors of philosophy
and priests.

The pantry and the coat closet
filled chest-high with books.

She sighed with happiness
when he drove away
to the mountain to fast.
For a while her life was
delightfully plain.

She daydreamed over coffee
and sometimes watched t.v..

When he came back
he built large cardboard structures
and odd humming machines
designed he said
to resonate to, and detect,
unseen force.

He began experiments
in talking to the dead.

Then one day he got well.
He gave away all
but a shelf full of books.
They once again made love.
His business voted him
man of the year.

With gentle humor, she’d say,
“You must have found
what you were looking for.”
And with an odd resilient look
he never lost

he never said.

Tom Hawkins
Raleigh, North Carolina

THE GREAT GANG BANG, 1939

Rubber was the first prerequisite
and usually the hardest item to find;
we needed plenty.
Then nails and pieces of good wood
that had to be just the right size,
about a foot long was best,
and an inch thick.
Clothespins, the old round two-pronged type,
were the easiest thing to get.
Then all we needed were girls.

We made our guns: the rubber
we got frm old tire innertubes;
cut into half inch strips
like huge rubber bands
stretched around the block of wood
they held the clothespin which was handle
and loading chamber.
The trigger was the nail,
our bullets
were an innertube’s yield of bands.

Put together in propoer fashion
you got
a GumBandGun.

You were Tom Mix or Buck Jones
riding your great white stallion
paddling your ass over a summer hill
and the girls
                             were the bad guys.

Haywood Jackson
Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania

TIT FOR TAT

Helen did it. I made her
teach me to dance in the
high school hallway one day.

When I was the monitor,
guarding the lavatory,
she came along, without a pass.

Well. With that position
of supreme authority,
how could I fail to

make it pay off big?
We danced a stately,
storklike dance,

and that very night
she called me to her
house on Rose Mont Hill

to help, she said,
her make white lace
doilies for her folks.

See, she never had,
and I knew how,
and her folks were

out.

Haywood, Jackson
Turtle Creek, Pennsylvania

FOOTNOTE

When I first saw her in the Heights, she tripped my
attention at once; a very footsome girl if ever I’d seen one. She
was carrying some heavy bundles and I politely asked her if
she needed a foot. As our feet brushed over the bundles I
knew we had gotten off on the right foot.

As we walked through the crowd I told her that she had
beautiful feet, and that I could tell by her long, elegant toes
that she must be a musician.l She confessed that she did play
the foot-organ. We fell into step naturally as we reached her
apartment and she asked me to come upstairs and rest my
feet.

I sat down in a leather chair that squeaked like a new
shoe. She removed her sandles and told me I could take off my
shoes if I felt like it. I did and our imtimacy grew rapidly. We
exchanged shoe sizes and she told me a bit about her life. She
had led a rather foot to mouth existence and I told her that
that was the kind of life I had always dreamed of living, but
that I had always felt like I had two left feet.

I sensed she was toeing with me but I wasn’t sure I
wanted to be footcuffed to someone I hardly knew. On the
one foot, Iwanted her, but, on the other foot, I was afraid of
the commitment that might imply.

She made the first move. I never would have forced her
foot the way she did mine for fear of rejection. But believe
me, I am a pretty footy fellow, and as our feet entangled I
felt as though I had stepped on a footgrenade. It was that
explosive a sensation. She was also ambipedrous which added
to the excitement.

Afterwards, she confessed that she had changed feet a
lot, but I said I wouldn’t hold this against her. It was then that
we both saw the footwriting on the wall and knew this was for
keeps. Perhaps it was the way she held up the footglass to
admire our feet, or the way she rested her chin on one foot as
she looked up at me, but I knew I was deeply in love.

I gave her my ankle bracelet and she gave me a toering as
beautiful as any that had ever adorned a toe, and for the first
time in our lives we both felt we finally had a toehold on
existence. We pledged to put our best foot forward and to
always footle each other with care.

Nick Johnson
Brooklyn, New York

BLACKOUT

A storm trooper blacksabbath day
turned to nightmind
crackling with laughter
ghost-shriek and eerie, death-boned
icedrums of thunder deafening the lights
a fuse-blowing wail of a rock group
computer-storm blind blackout seconds
wondering
if this cruel age oF skycscrapers
has passed away at last
into the future
of canoes.

Tom Jones
Washington, D.C

CYCLE POEM

A YOUNG MAN roars up to 115 Live Oak Lane.

A YOUNG WOMAN has been waiting a long time for this moment.
Nick is the least popoular boy in school and so cute that
most of the girls say they would do anything to ride
behind him.

AN OLDER MAN looks at Nick in his leather pants. He sees
that Suzanne adores him and follows in the Buick. Sure
enough, after some junk food Nick takes Suzanne to his
place, a garage with spare parts gleaming everywhere,
even over the bed. The man peeks through the window.
Nick makes Suzanne dance to the radio and take off
her clothes. The man is repelled for hours and barely
beats them home.

AN OLDER WOMAN listens to her husband’s report. She
is disgusted yet later in bed finds herself enormously
capable. She thinks this is just the ticket. It turns
out to be a fine night for everyone.

              BUT WAIT

The young woman and the two older people live on the memory
of the evening they refer to as Nick’s NIght. When Nick does
not ask Suzanne ourt after a week or two, father buys daughter
her first revealing blouse and skintight pants. Nothing
doing. So mother also gets dolled up and hangs around with
the tough crowd after school. Still no. Finally they
mortgage the house and buy three Vincent Black Shadows.
The whole family roars over to Nick’s place who — when
he hears the punctual revving — wonders what he is in for.

Ronald Koertge
South Pasadena, California

Morning Raga

The little blond schoolgirl voluptuary in green
shades, cutoffs, halter top, filigree gold pen-
dants & jade bracelets by whose waters I sat down
awaiting the S bus, had perched her petulant
little ass on the backrest of the busbench; her
huge green platform shoes commandeered the seat
beside mine; her midriff-omphalos being no more
than a twist fom my yawning lips I could as
easily have reached over & bit into a soft chunk
of her belly as not. The assault on the sun by
the whiteness of women’s bodies. NO, in this
case the darkness. She was bronzed to a turn.
But the restraint of jacket & tie, the propspect
of oboviously ghastly consequences & the spec-
kled green vulgarity of her painted big toe
disssuaded me. Besides, it was a work-day &
far too early in the morning for festivities.
The sun was just beginning to bubble up
over Collins Avenue.

Steve Kowit
San Diego, California

Small Business Boom

A spaghetti-headed hippie in a black fedora
& his droopy-eyed Chicano sidekick
are dealing dope
across the street from Horton Plaza.
Spaghetti keeps bumping into pedestrians,
an unorthodox approach
but it gets results:
he offs three lids in ten minutes
& the brunette
in the hot-pink hot pants
& maroon sweater strutting
it down the street likewise
looks to be doing a brisk business.

Steve Kowit
San Diego, California

City Skip

Skip roll-rocks his burgeoning way
       to the burly night-speaks of east L.A.
A rabid reflection in a Figueroa windowpane,
       he pulls a purple bottle
              from a brown paper bag.
Producing prodigious wind-sacks
              of badly weakened syntax,
       he does a quick jig and a taxi flag.
The he flames down to Hollywood in a yellow cab,
       where he postleans, corner-smokes,
              coinjingles and dirty-jokes his way
       into the celluloid heart of old L.A.
His shirt is open, sunning pimples on his chest
       beneath the brash blue aura
              of steeltree blue lamps.
He runs, alley-wise, with nostrils flaring,
       with wind-fly ears, roaring, swearing,
              seeking solace in the slap-rip noises
                     of the city play-seeks.
Eyes filled with Babylonian image bombs,
                     he’s digging all the freaks.
Flash, splash, wheeze, he jerks,
              stoned again, his legs berserk,
       as the neon color wizardry works
              on the bewildering screen
                     of a Tequila sky . . .
       and if you get in his way, he’ll black your eye.
Whiskey stars, like double-shot choirs,
              sing to Skipper’s deeper desires,
                     goading him to seek and acquire
                            a suitable receptacle
              amid the parking lot tires
              for the guiltless power of his ringing chimes.
So, he buys a blue lady for a real good time.
Trollop, trollop, the seed bag sways
       rocking Skipper’s turnstyle away,
              in the deep dim of the hob-knob bob,
                     long and squeeking,
              delightedly creaking
       the dawn from its sleep.
It’s all observed by a peeping tom creep,
       who tramples the bushes outside by the street.
The lady then leaves while Skip’s asleep.
His wallet, watch and jewelry she keeps.
He wakes up, his mind in limbo,
       ripped off by the L.A. bimbo.

Michael G. Leigh
Long Beach, California

THE OLD LOT

They cleared the old lot
and found bones    a cat,
a rat skeleton
and weeds with strong deep roots,
weeds with white flowers in the spring.
They found holes empty    and cans,
bottles and a letter to John Germaine.

One of the workers opened it,
an unlined sheet of paper,
the words     I loved you once,
and nothing more.

It was a hazard     the old lot
dry     a match would hit like lightning,
burn and crackle.

Now the dust shimmies in the wind.
Like on the flat plain of the desert
far off,
you see things coming
and they come.

Martin Levy
Los Angeles, California

JENNIFER

A hole where the heart should be
I’ve no life left for you   litte fish   you leap between my hips
Double every day your impossible demands
Pregnant at forty   I’m grotesque   frightened   I’ll lose my job
The frame house in Venice   the weedy yard
Where my son practices jump shots after school
Nights, I dig heels against the mattress
Pull blankets over my head
Crazy   I slide a knintting needle from the ball of wool
Sharpen it with a file   sterilize it over a stove burner
Until heat sears thru the asbestos glove
One strong push upward into tissue –
My hands are water   the needle rolls unused on the bathroom rug
Scared of myself I throw up again and again
Blunder off curbs into traffic

Late July   I swim to the surface in shop windows
My glass self in a sleeveless maternity dress
Arms smooth and brown
Bean vine
You climb my backbone
Fill me out in front      I roof you over
Wall you in   you are mine
You push tendrils up thru my eyes   my mouth
I sing of you and weep
The monstrous pains begin   something’s gone wrong
The young doctor can’t hear your heart beat
He shifts his stethoscope over the nave of my belly
We both sweat   I bear down
You slide out on the bloody cloths
Blue-white and cold
Your breath does not come

The hospital packs my overnight bag
Sends me home   after the burial   I totter
Around the living room on two dry twigs
Dust table tops   therapy   my son
Twists sideways over the weed stubble
LIfts the ball above his head   stubborn
Trying to get it right
His shot strikes the metal rim   thump
Thump the side of the house
I stand in the center of the room
Eyes closed   dust cloth pressed against my mouth
Boards shudder   indent   recoil
Bone jar   fists thud into flesh   my bruises leap and connect

Carol Lewis
Santa Monica, California

WAR GAMES
                   to my son

You draw colored lines on maps
Blue for us   red for them
Books stacked in your room
Details of machine guns   artillery
We watch old war movies on TV   black and white
That’s an AK-50   you explain
A Sherman and Tiger duel
Walls in the village collapse
The hero wears the broad freckled face of Nebraska
Just doing hi job
Wipes out a tank with his last grenade
Black wounds open
The enemy crawls forward   hair and clothes on fire
His agony existed before you were born
And will exist

Feetup on the coffee table
You handle the remote control switch
Armies fan out across valleys
Generals pose over maps   parcel out countries
Waterloo   Iwo Jima
You refight them all and win big
Nights   the enemy advances   his cannon pound your suburbs
His sappers blow your barbed wire
The cry from your room wakes me
Your strongholds crumbling
I am in another country
Too far away to help

Carol Lewis
Santa Monica, California

THE CANDIDATE

is running so fast
you can’t tell
what he’s doing
He tap dances

into your bed
jogs around
your nipoples   verbs
blur   he wraps

his smile around
you tight   it’s
so fast you
don’t know how

your panties
got on the floor
or where he’s been
You can’t tell

where you stand
in the wind
that sucks you
breathless when

he rushes out
leaving holes   walls
that don’t connect
to any ceiling

from this twister
that slams you into
stone   like his twisted words

lyn lifshin
Niskayuna, New York

WINE   APPLE SMOKE AND WINDCHIMES

apple smoke
must have been
pulling on the
vines i could feel my hands
stretching toeward
you like the ivy
knotted   i wanted to un
button   black
velvet i could hlf feel your
fingers thru already
you carried me up 3 flights
canteloup light   slow
and moving a
piece of night like maple
syrup thrown on snow
colored of stained glass
you could eat

lyn lifshin
Niskayuna, New York

the bride of the hound of the baskervilles

the honeymoon was over
when she caught him
absentmindedly drying
his penis on her face towel

Gerald Locklin
Long Beach. California

jam fa jamaica

munch lime   sip sky juice   slurp ksikimp pine
honey bee bus   from mo bay   tree behine   chat/flat?/scratch?
climb eel el spine bluesy mt. revery
twelth tribe gullies airwaves upon babylon
quick step   wait-a-bit   smell english mon
me no sen   you no come   cockpit country   is a halt
whence lamb’s blood benevolence   visions from judah
hazard apocalyptic name   mane rye-chee-ous-ness
driven off plains   sieve plots   hand idle land idle
abeng call pall: garoo garoooo garoooooo

shrink credit   crime caution   daily   gleaning
surfeit shoal    dovecote whistling   toady motto
cricket creak out of anyone people won people

runaway bay bay   stout dragon’s creeping fish redeemer
tout lout flagon   fume barreling rheum

grueled effigy keen exorbitant gas
impossible to purchase face cream masque
clean house!   after maid!   all   the life

me whan go home   heart down   head turn   a round
bout trench town six bends yard boil

hewer of wood   drawer of water   caster of stone
smile gem acre   hope’s gardener   marooned coral aisle
in heart land garvey nanny nyam bammy   rule mon-a-cool

star ward   herons dip   poise   sleek viney web
ibo eye   feeshire   cool tumbling spring
wheel on   clipped prpophecy   cane hack   tough black scar line
tug push pull bump sway drift raft
capatain mento lean streaks mauve sunset:
"ahm troo mahn   budt ama pooer mahn yusee
ah hav likkle skoolin   ah hav to wok verry verry odddd
budt pooer mahn dai soon come   so-shall-eesm bettah fa awl"

back pasture   salt gut   spur tree
rat trap   lambs river   ginger hill
oracabesso   rio bueno

salvation army blares liberty
in twilight square of port antonio

Charles Lynch
Brooklyn, New York

NOVEMBER NIGHT

The fishscale snow
stacks on the shed’s
only window, the rope
whispers to the beam,
the black loft beyond
the lantern’s law;
playing on the planks,
the pup rewinds his
shadow,cocks his
heaed at the stiff
legs of the deer,
the knife standing
on the oiled stone.

James Magorian
Helena, Montana

My father is a hubcap.
My mother is a sheel.
But they don’t get around much anymore.

I remember the paisley seatcovers
          in our 1960 Ford.
I used to stroke them for hours.
My father caught me one day.
I still had dust on my fingers.
I couldn’t explain.
But I knew that beneath his gabardine slacks,
        he had paisley legs just like mother’s back.
I tried to explain.
He shifted his cotton-briefed hips,
        and mother smiled.
That’s when I noticed her teeth fit
        together like a zipper in gabardine lips.
I continued to explain.
Mother turned away and rolled into the kitchen,
        and father collapsed with a clatter.

The Ford was sold to a neighbor with hives,
         but I still carry the dust of those seatcovers
         with me in an aspirin bottle in my purse,
         and the paisley heart of my fingers
         yet beats for the upholstery of my youth.

man
Santa Monica, California

TRAIN

You buy a paperback to read on the train.
A novel about broken promises and their
consequences. The hero is looking for
someone who understands the demands made
by loneliness.

A secondary characater seems strangely
familiar. You soon realize that this
character has many of your own faults and
virtues. Even more startling, this
fictitioius creation comes from your home
town.

Your uneasiness lessens as the novel’s
hero once more becomes the story’s main
focus. While having supper in the dining
car, you mull over the novel’s implications
and speculate on the outcome of the hero’s
romances.

Back in your seat, you resume reading.
Again, the character who resembles you
surfaces. The character, like yourself, is
married. Your spouses hve the same name.
The revelation is unnerving.

The character must make a business trip and
boardes a train. He buys a novel to passs the
time. The coincidence has become frightening.

After an evening meal the character returns
to his seat and resumes rfeading. You glance
at your watch. The character looks at his
watch and shortly thereafter the train has a
terrible collision. Dropping the book, you
grab for the emergency cord but already the
brakes are screeching with the crunch of metal
not far behind.

Robert Matte Jr.
Tucson, Arizona

One in a Million

I hug my step-baby, I heat his bottle.
Finland is the thin frown my mother gives me.
My father stacks vegetables on the seacoast;
he phones he’ll kill my boyfriend if I have one.

The doctors peel my girlfriends’ jeans off
like adhesive and stick hooks up inside them.
If Friday night doesn’t find them on the floor,
the mortuary arrives for them on Monday.

I can’t control myself around Tattoos, though;
they beat me into the kitchen, I pull a knife.
Once the librarian pulled my blouse off;
I wouldn’t sit for his kids now if he begged me.

This is what I do to keep my distance:
I laugh like an old detective, I collect fractures;
I also collect black lace, hair driers and hats.
If it ever rains, I set out buckets for it.

Will I chase the wind with a birdcage when I’m thirty,
or bring posies to the animal graveyard,
homesick for despair? I’ve slept so long
the prince will have to wake me with a hammer.

Mark McCloskey
Los Angeles, California

The Last Delaware is a Bellydancer

The day my aunt goes down the hole in her,
I’ll be the last Delaware on the West Coast.
I already know the ears of the dead are cave-ins.
There were no reservations where I grew up.

The grown-ups who went crazy had the truck route;
the rest of us were parked with the lights off,
bending the rules of hearsay into letdown.
Sixteen was tired when she got to me.

Still I put myself in the hands of blondes . . .
and no boy came for me to say no to.
The weak are the oldest hunters and don’t miss:
I threw myself on sex while it was grazing.

My car let no one drive it but me.
I rode it like an Indian pony at the speedway,
and though it always fell short of the best time,
hundreds of men paid to see my weekends.

My teachers’ dirty looks are asleep now.
Soon they’ll talk of Chief Belly Dance
and her massacre of the marriages at Moon Creek.
I won’t be the last anything if I can help it.

Mark McCloskey
Los Angeles, California

            Dancer

            She didn’t know why she recalled her mother
that day. Her mother’s four-fingered hand on the
wheel of the old Ford, steering through country
roads, complaining about the heat and talking,
non-stop. Just like she didn’t know exactly why
she asked her mother to stop and pull to the side
of the road where she got out.
"I have to dance," she said. And did in a frenzy.
"I just have to dance."

            Maybe it was the boy
            strumming his bike
            along the sun

            building up on the sand bar
            that made her think
            of that day

            while she waded
            in white cotton pants
            rolled up to the knee

            and listened to the sky
            blueing and clams whanging
            in a rusty pail

            The wind whipped loose hair
            and plugged her ears
            with sea chants

            And then she got that feeling
            again. After all thsoe years
            That feeling

            She swiveled out of her clothes
            and faded woolen bathingsuit
            & danced

            deeper and deeper into the water
            while the blue china sky churned
            up whitecaps & everything

            gathered into a bloody sunset
            & clams swelled in a pail
            abandoned at the shore

roberta metz
New York, New York

KADDISH

On a crowded bus an old man stares,
gives up his seat and comes over to her.
"You look just like him," he says
and she wonders,
transforming this whisper of a man
into grandpa’s heroic physique,
dressing him in pin-stripes
and a woolen cap that always cast a shadow
over his one good eye.
Could it be?
No, grandpa was bigger. Much taller.
"Your grandfather was a prince, my best friend
in the world. I sometimes say a prayer for him,"
She offered him her seat, a lifesaver.
He followed her off the bus.
She ordered him a coffee, something to eat.
"Thanbks for the tonic, but favors I don’t need."
and pressed some coins in her hand.
He confessed he received messages
from his dead aunt on his mother’s side.
And kept pointing two fingers
as if to shoot her.
She walked him to the bus stop.
And helped him up.
He said, "It’s important for a man to have children."
The bus started to move.
He called out the window. "Who will pray for me?"
She didn’t know.

robert metz
New York, New York

John, years a garage mechanic in Hawley,
one day packed a green duffel
needed ina time of killing,
then forgotten
whern not with whiskey.
Abandoned his town
by beginning to walk away.
Opened his eyes at the harbor.
Again. Old. Poor.

And Ed.
Heavy arms tattooed.
The bad leg like fire.
The red Ford pick-up smeared
with deer blood and fishscales.
Buried his wife near the Bonesack,
long before the dark cough
stopped his heart.
His sand-blown eyes
were proof the Dakotas lived
for us to love and fear.

My father spoke of these men
when we dipped for minnows,
dark shapes darting
in their cold stone tanks.

Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut

PIECE OF THE DAY

Dusty wheels eat
the gray air east toward Stoneington.
Headstones taken for granted.
Vines almost bare.
Even the linemen will not climb.
Carved pumpkins sag on doorsteps.
An old woman fishing from a bridge
leans into sleep.

Too many layers of men
have lived on this land.
The cold cliff-faces
wind-burned smooth.
The stuffed grizzly in the Mobil station
fills me with fear
as real as exhaust.

At the yellow caution light
I do not yield.
The greenhousess are empty.
The road owns a piece of the day.

Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut

THE MONASTERY

A bell is rung.

Lean voices murmur the moon office.
Hair hidden under hard cloth.
Old Dominican sisters sing
in bodies that look like white birds.
Their language is kind, detailed.

Shoulders are taboo.
Gates are locked.
Blankeets are folded.
Windows are closed.
Dust does not live here.
All is in order.

I have not come to confess.
I am a tourist
in a silence with no roof.
I have come for a room,
two meals, the passage of a day.

At dawn I ask for a key.
Mist moves through gorges.
Mountains appear.
Oleander sun and cedar reach for me.

Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut

THE UNFINISHED ROOM

When I wake
street lights still burn.
Ice is born on the dead pine.
The yellowjacket hive grown slow.

All morning a slow rain
gives itself away
on the gray road that dips
and rises off the map.

I live outside
the unfinished room.
The worn floor
mountainous with luiquor boxes
filled with forgotten books,
a battle front
of photographs and mileage receipts.

A portrait of a soldier
stares at me from the far wall,
reminding me that here,
like the spider
I sweep from the corner,
my small history continues.

Michael Moos
Waterford, Connecticut

THE WAITRESS

Morning sky the gray of burned matches.

In Howard Johnson’s: thin voices,
like worn-out sandpaper,
of men who have worked long.

The hour when salesmen
drunk on travel,
enter the day,
maps torn and folded wrong.

The old waitress who has given up
on the tint of her hair,
claims the willows will bud tomorrow.
I believe her
because of the way she moves her hands.
I wonder if she sets these tables for her rent,
or serves coffee to strangers
to keep the memory still.
All I can give her are coins.

Michael Moos
Watertown, Connecticut

TRYING TO MAKE MYSELF CLEAR

This night could crack in two
                           I want direction, so bad
my arms
               straddling each side

Oh why the hammer, nails?
They lock a box.

            I thought I knew everything in a bed one night.
Don’t frighten me with your desert space.
Your wide eyes
                          contain pieces of women.
They dance down your back like fireflies.

                       Oh I’d choke on your desert air,
burn out in your fractured light.

                              with my dreams of tiny rooms
                              where each sentence is drawn on the wall
                              in thick paint
                                                      so I can read it
                              like a book or the weather.

I am still
               separating continents
placing maps along my body
                                             east and west
Don’t you see
                        I am alone here.

Soon I will walk into space, your desert
without a compass
                              ride a blue-eyed stallion
blind, along the Pacific
                                    shoot words with a bow and arrow
                                    watch them break
                                         into a thousand letters
                                              running down my body
                                                   like water….

Louise Nayer
San Francisco, Califronia

Collecting

I’ve misplaced the child
the great hummer
the heel-kicking wonder kid
who shook this house
with junk and noise.

A new-breasted girl
will walk with a sidelong glance
at cars and men,
her hands and smiles
will mimic a grown-up poise;
she practices a ruse
and fades from her mother’s side.

"Dress like the older mothers,
don’t say anything strange at the meeting."
I lost my popish rectitude
gradually
as gradually as the child fades.

I find her at bedtime, at the beach
where waves entice
with music and glitter,
I stumble on moments
of make-believe,
her apprenticeship
to deeper passions,
then lose her in a moment.

I’ve misplaced the child;
I tiptoe, I sidle, I sneak
in secret agent’s disguise
(learned frm her)
to capture moments,
document them for rainy days
when I’ll be used to the woman
but long for the child.

Rosalind Neroni
Santa Monica, California

DOWN BY THE SEASIDE

The sea-faring bards
Take their similes & metaphors & symbols
And dunk them like day-old dnouts
In coffee cup surfs
Then with a soppy poetics
(Bred from the puppydog rhythm
Of stand-still waves
That do little more
Than lick dormant sands
& water stoic rocks)
They fashion spells of love & melancholy
Slither into them
& feign hypnosis
Until they can’t stand the humidity
I guess

If rhythm–
Why not a rhythm that explores & discovers
Like that of two lovers
Caught in the heat of sex
Pounding together with piston-fed passion–
A rhythm that amid screams & groans
Sends two minds
Bullet-like
Through fire & ice
Marries them to the burn & freeze of climax
Then, rudely, drops them–spent
Ina heap of heavy breathing, sighs & memories

If waves–
Why not waves that speak with force & conviction
Like those that hammer & plunder
The steel & wood & flesh & blood
Of hapless, cork-like intrruders
Or those that repair the rifts
Left by diving transmitter-fed predators
Stalking, salivating, studyinig
Patiently waiting to devour the world
In shatter & crush & flame

If the sea at all, poets of wet things
Not when it obeediently paws at the shore
But when it crashes over its boundaries
& lashes at trees, houses, people
Sweping them through streets
Over fields
Like tiny toys
Sucked through anangry universe–
Or when it recedes
Leaving its bottom parched & sterile
Laying waste its tenants
Lile so much incinerated debris
No, not donut-dunking seas
With the puppydog rhythm of standstill waves
But seas that command with wrath & denial

Meanwhile–
Drunk on sunsets & birds & night air
The vassals of Neptune
Continue to renounce
Their aquatic souls
To placid seas
And more placaid snads
          While the surf goes nowhere
          Just like their poetry

Patrick O’Neill
Ironwood, Michigan

PRINCESS HOLLYWOOD AND THE VAGABOND

i walked behind you for a half a block
And I don’t know why I was attracted by
The blank agitated way
You rejected all the exquisite soft scarves
        in the Boutique where I had followed you, but I
Walked over when I overheard you
Ask a salesgirl if she had an extra cigarette
And offered you one of mine. You didn’t like the brand
But took it anyway. And I lingered there
On that half-bloomed-rose-look
Of your parted lips
                  while we talked
About rock-music and imported cars and not
                               much else. I said I liked
What you liked.
I didn’t care.
I wanted to lie down beside all my ideas
                                about your long legs.

I prayed for the coffee outside at a hamburger stand and we
Decided to drive down to a beach that was nearby…
You never travelled. You didn’t read much. We ran out
Of things to talk about and kept walking on up to the jetty
Where I started to gather stones and shells. And I handed some
To you. You didn’t say anything, then you said they were "nice"
And firmly held them
                in your little fist
             with the chocolate colored
                                         painted nails…

Watching some gulls wash themselves
In a clear pool of dark water
I leaned back, I leaned toward you a little bit
And you asked me to help brush the sand off your feet
So you could pull your boots back on. And I handled
Your legs like I was pulling some damned smooth thing
                                                             out of wind
                    down on your foot
                    for a shoe.

You got up.
You said something muffled I couldn’t hear.
You started to walk away without looking
Or saying anything to me. I got up
             you kept walking
                      I sat back down. And I didn’t care.
It was only about an hour and a half. You had
Beautiful legs. I’d be gone the
Next day. I didn’t mind.
But you could’ve gone owver the other side,
You didn’t have to
            step down with all your fashionable weight
On the pretty stones and shells
Pressing them
            back into the earth.

Doren Robbins
Santa Monica, California

         YOU FLOAT DOWN MY EYES

         You walk up from the river
You float fown my eyes

Do what you like, white
                    strap-lines
           on the clove shade of your shoulders,
Voice like an untouched bell—the moon comes up
On the burnt looking horizon,
                             you walk up
                      from the river
A river of yourself—you float
             down my eyes—

I stare over the split stone cliff,
                      the donkey standing
                           on the shaded hill—it’s all
The same—you
            float down my eyes—I look away you
                           float down my eyes—
Do what you like
On the hillside of oregano,
In the field of
           short sunflowers—the slow look
                                on your face, the blue
                          dust on the figskin—
Do what you like…

Some needles spin down
From the pine trees,
Some pine cones hve started
                     to spin open—you walk up from the river—
       you float down my eyes, split stone clif—
It’s all the same…

Hillside of oregano,
Clove shade on your shoulders—you don’t know
                          how good you are—twin
           hills of moon
       your eyes come near
                              in sleep—you don’t know…

You lay your head back
On the bedroll
Adn look up at me like
We have been together
For twenty years—
                           I take down
             the faded towel
                        from your body,
      I whip your throat slow
                               with my hair—

Soft pine shade

Split stone cliff

The river
Giving up what it owns
To the sea.

Doren Robbens
Santa Monica, California

LATE NEWS

The newsboy didn’t come back
From his route.
The lady on Drexel St. called.
He’d never missed her before.
The father went out looking,
An ominous reptilian
Fear for his boy
Crawling up his back
Under his sweat-soaked shirt.

What about a crazy.
Turning a corner,
Two wheels on the pavement:
The kid was only eleven.
What did he know
About a crazy?

They found him
Six feet beyond
A chain link fence
Blown down by a rain,
Where two Danes,
Standing above his shoulder
Suddenly became a pack,
Attacked
And mauled him
So you coul sitck a fist
In the cavity they made
In his chest.

The owner got home
Horrified to find
His two dogs’ work.
After the quarantine
He said
They’d be destroyed.

Laurel Speer
Tucson, Arizona

Leaving South Sixth East

When I go, it can’t be any state, you
at the back of a month reading horoscopes
to find my favorite linel. Someplace famous
or New England, not the blurred figure upstream
worried about fish. Water with salt, a glass bridge
and God, no crickets when I go.

Fi I taught geese as make-believe,
would you look up or walk the shore the way
a river draws me in? My efforts are torn grammar
that jars the lid of an oil drum. Corrected for reference:
opera at five a.m., brandy then spaghetti but why go?
Didn’t we find lemonade across town below zero?
Doesn’t the talk in your sleep start
my index under poersonality,
changes I can’t make?

Take your clothes and oyster stew.
I’ve heard enogh of Houston and diarrhea
on the bus. Your sister at nursing school
wouldn’t approve my bathroom or double solitaire
on an odd cigarete-burned sheet. You want me to go.
Early where the floor creaks, the woman with cats
in her basement of electric wire has a slow limp
to the piano I play. The end, I think,
doesn’t fit the same dream.

Stop me. It will be a pink wall
with two paintings mostly black. I’ll smoke
more, pull the curtains before dusk. I may plant
cactus, a windowbox of herbs. No peonies. No Wednesday.
No Perry Mason reruns. Maine, perhaps
and less wind if you come back.

Dennice Scanlon
Butte, Montana

Ever Nearer the Gutter

You know how it is,
with new dragons to be slain
every other day,
sometimes you’re drawn
as if on wheels
to walk to the nearest bar
where aflter one too many
the rotten taste of liquor
goes away
and there’s a brawl
going on inside your swimming head,
and soon the sharp edge
is filed off
that vast tumult of sadnesses
that has vised you in its grip.

Outisde
on dim lit streets
mouthy winds exhale,
make your eyes run wet
as you stumble along
sidewalks that sway like the sea…

then
that sewage of mind and heart
sinks down with you
as you hit asphalt hard as reality,
in the midst of a city
that stands sober and upright,
and you barf up
all the outrage of a lifetime,
you know how it is,
with new dragons to be slain
every other day.

Face down ever nearer the gutter
on cement where ants get smashed
and unburdened
beneath shoes big enough to be God,

your fisted heart
pounds forth a wild surf of blood
and you acknowledge
the sometime dismal failure of your will
to just hang on
peer over the edge
while swift moments
are butchered off the hours,
you know how it is,
with new dragons to be slain
every other day.

You brace yourself
and in desperate urgency
groping you porobe, try to find your way,
mayhbe even say a prayer,
in spite of
the accumulated puke of a mind,
you know how it is.

Nikki Selditz
Studio City, California

Copyright 2007 by Madeline Sharples

CONTENTS

What Is Loss?

I lose my keys or sunglasses
and find them in my hand all along.
I lose my little boy in the department store
and he pops out squealing with laughter
from under the clothes display.
I lose important papers
and find them
in the stack of other papers on my desk.

I didn’t lose my son, Paul.
Paul is dead. Death is forever.
There’s not a chance of finding him.

The light I’ve left on in the hall for him
every night since he died
doesn’t show him the way back home.
There are no more piano gigs out there for him.
The Sunday paper entertainment guide
doesn’t list his name at any jazz club.
He can’t join the young guys at the Apple Genius Bar
and help people solve their computer problems.
Paul would have loved that job.
He was made for that job,
but he checked out too early.
The new meds and surgery for manic depression,
the new information about mental illness
are not for him.

Why do people refer to death as loss?
Maybe just to encourage
people like me.
Maybe just to keep me looking for him.
Maybe so I can pretend he’s still out there.

Maybe that’s why I long to mother
the strong young men at the gym
who hardly notice me
and the bright ones at work.
They are the right age.
They have the same look.
They have the same appeal.

Every time I see a young man
with close-buzzed hair,
well-worn jeans
a white t-shirt and a black jacket
sitting outside of Starbucks
sucking on a cigarette,
every time I see a skinny guy
walking fast across the street
carrying a brown leather bag over his shoulder,
I look to make sure.

Blizzard in B

It is mid March, 1993,
and a bitter blizzard blows in.
Some predict
the century’s biggest.

Flakes of snow swirl in gusts to the sidewalk.
Cold slaps our cheeks
pushes through our clothes
as we cling to each other,
walk through the cavern
at the feet of New York’s skyscrapers.
The sirens set our teeth chattering
as impatient cabbies honk,
inch their way up the streets.

Yet, we trudge forward
uncertain of what
we will discover when we arrive.
A more foreboding blizzard, perhaps,
blows through our boy’s broken brain.

The Last Night

How could I have known
it would be the last night? A night
like all the others:
the low creaking groan
of the garage door,
tires screeching to maneuver
into the narrow place,
the roar of the engine before silence.
Then slamming the door,
my son, sweeps down the long hall,
calling out hello in his deep friendly voice.
I startle as I hear his heavy strides
pass my door,
I call out to him.
Returning, he enters my room –
standing, staring, looking more calm
than I’ve ever seen him.
His blue eyes like sapphires
fringed with thick dark lashes
never leave mine while we speak.
My lips kiss his cheek
cool as alabaster.
I marvel at his smile – lips
barely turned up not showing his teeth.
He looks like the angel
he will soon become.
He has already found peace.
Only I don’t know it yet.

Thursday Morning

When all I heard was silence
behind the locked bathroom door
that Thursday morning,
when all I saw was darkness
through the open bedroom door,
when Bob went to investigate,
calling his name, Paul,
pleading with him, Paul,
open the door,
when Bob went to the garage
for a screwdriver to pick the lock,
when he opened the door
and closed it quickly from the inside
while I stood on the stairs,
waiting
as Bob found our son in the bathtub,
sitting in a pool of blood,
blue, already cold and stiff,
tongue hanging out of his mouth,
when Bob came out of the bathroom
face red, hands shaking
and told me
Paul is dead,
when all I heard were sirens
and the footsteps of the police
as they stomped though our house,
all I could do was huddle
in the corner of the couch,
my legs drawn under me,
my arms folded around me,
as I rocked back and forth,
my hands clamped into tight fists.

Suicide

There is no gentle way to say it:
He killed himself
Took his own life
He ended his life
He released his pain
He committed suicide

What he did one night was
put himself in the bathtub and
slash his throat with a box cutter.
That’s what he did.
That’s the truth.

Calling it dying, passing away
does not change the reality
for me and his father and his brother
who cared for him and loved him.
but couldn’t keep him from his destiny 
death by suicide.

My Jazzman

My jazzman
beat it out
on the mighty eighty-eights
played those riffs
tapped his feet
bent his head
down to the keys
felt those sounds
on his fingertips.
Yeah, he was a hot man
on those eighty-eights.

But, all too soon
his bag grew dark.
He went down
deep down.
My jazzman
played the blues
lost that spark
closed the lid.
And, yeah, you got it right,
quit the scene.
laid himself down
in that bone yard
for the big sleep.

Aftermath

They came in droves at first
out of concern, out of curiosity.
They sent flowers, cards
and sweet notes saying
call anytime
anytime at all.

Now it is quiet.
A few friends
invite us out,
or come by.
The rest have moved on
glad to have done their duty.

Don’t they know I’m not contagious?
My son’s death will not rub off.
I’m the same person I was before.
A sadder person, perhaps
but needing my friends
just the same.

September 23, 2002

The phone rings once
startling me awake
from a deep sleep.
I jump out of bed to answer it
knocking the Waterford
perfume bottle from my dresser,
and there is no one on the line.

Only 5 a.m. but I am up
for the third anniversary of Paul’s death,
a day I dread every year.
All I can think is
Paul called to check in,
to let us know he is still around:

I go out on the porch
and watch the orange half moon
set behind the trees.

Demolition

Bathroom:
We don’t have to look into that room anymore
and wonder if spots of blood still remain
on the floors and walls.
We’ve demolished the scene of the crime.
We will no longer step into that tub and see Paul
in his white long sleeved work shirt
and khaki pants sitting against the shower door
in a bloody puddle.
They’ve taken it all away.
The old aqua blue tub
the toilet, and sinks.
the faux marble counter
with burn stains from the tiny firecrackers
he set off as a teenager.
The god-awful blue and yellow vinyl flooring is gone.
Sterile white tiles and fixtures
will take their place
in a room with no memories
either of life or death.

Bedroom:
Six years later
instead of the dark room
he walked out of for the last time
leaving the door slightly ajar
his bed never slept in
his dirty laundry
slung over his over-stuffed chair,
his paychecks left on the side table
uncashed for weeks,
his pictures and posters meticulously thumbtacked
in perfect rows on the walls
his books and records all lined up
in alphabetical order in his closet
along with his shoes and plaid shirts from second-hand stores,
his keyboard, electronic drums, amplifier,
and his music, each tape labeled and packed
in a canvas bag,
so we could easily choose
a piece to play at his funeral.
Instead, the room now totally bare
except for a new bay window
that looks over the garden
and new shiny hardwood floors.

A writing table and a comfortable sofa
will go in there
with space in the closet
for shelves of poetry books,
files of poems hoping to be published.

Garage:
Boxes labeled Paul’s fiction A-Z
Paul’s jazz records K-O
Paul’s rock and roll A-F
stacked where I can see them
as I open the door
park my car every evening
after a long day at work.
On top of the boxes
a pile of dungeons and dragon games
one tarnished brass duck bookend
he got for his Bar Mitzvah,
the purple treasure chest
where he kept his pot,
a cigar box filled with metals and belt buckles
his uncle brought him from Russia.

Leaning against the wall
a roll of drawings
he made in Bellevue’s psych ward
each declaring his love for Sally
now married with two children.
A photo of her
with high pointing breasts,
slim waist, flat stomach, and round, firm buttocks
shows her proud, and so ready,
though Paul was not.
He let her go
He let it all go
with one sweep of the knife.

The Dreaded Question

It happens again like so many times before.
I’m at my sister’s house,
talking to her neighbor
someone I’ve just met
and she asks me the dreaded question
one that I’m avoiding
by talking about what a great day
this has been in Portland
and isn’t my sister’s garden just beautiful
and what do you do for a living
and where are you from.
And there it is,
after I’ve tossed the salad greens
put the tomatoes in the bowl
and sliced in the avocado
“How many children do you have?” she asks.
And never missing a beat
I say, I had two
but now, only one.
My oldest son died.
Then I leave to get myself together
and wonder what she and my sister are saying
while I am lying down in my room.

Buddha

“The dead we can imagine to be anything at all.”
Ann Patchett, Bel Canto

He sits cross-legged in a tree
deep in concentration,
the way he would sit on the floor of his room
learning against the bed doing homework,
composing music, talking on the phone.
His closed-mouth grin shows
he is pleased to be where he is.
No longer a skinny rail, his cheeks filled out,
his skin clear, his eyes bright.
His tree has everything – soft jazz sounds
flowing from all directions,
deep vees and pillows for sitting and reclining,
the scent of incense and flowers,
branches of books by Miller, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky
the music of Davis, Gould, Bach and Lennon,
and virtual communication to those he loves.
He needs no furniture, no bedding, no clothes, no food.
Those necessities are for worldly beings.
The passing clouds give him comfort
and the stars light his way.
Heaven takes care of him
as he imagines himself
to be anything at all.

The Bully

Paul is a bully.
Always waiting to take over my poems.
I’m writing about my mother
who starved herself last year,
hanging on for weeks in a morphine-induced coma,
using up every bit of energy I had
until she finally died.

And here he comes pushing her aside
to get to the front of the line.
He brags so the whole playground can hear.
“My suicide is bigger,
I used a box cutter; she just stopped eating.”

And he’s right.
Compared to his death
hers was a bump in the road.
He was my beautiful sick boy,
she, a not-so-nice shriveled old woman
who had wished for death for years.
She’d call me a bad daughter for saying this
but I don’t miss her at all.

Done Deal

We sat at the wooden table
shaded by large heart-shaped leaves.
The crone with wispy white hair
hanging in strings around her face,
a mouth that’s forgotten how to smile,
skin drawn, pale like rice paper
hunched in her wheel chair
listening or not.

This is where you’ll be for the rest of your days,
this is the end of the line.
You’re done moving, I said.
You’ll never be able to be on your own again.
No matter how much you hate this place,
get over it.
It’s a done deal.

Then, I laid out the plan.
I’ll give notice at your retirement hotel,
put your things in storage
minus the few pieces you can bring here.
And, don’t worry,
I’ll keep them all safe.

Not saying anything in return
she tapped her painted red claws
in between the grooves of the table.
When she couldn’t see or hear me anymore
I pushed her chair inside
while her vacant eyes
filmed over
stared out into the gloom.

Dream World

I look toward my mother’s bed
in its sunny spot by the window.
Her young nurse is smiling.
So is mother.
She lies in a blue hospital gown
printed with triangles, squares and circles
in shades of gray, burgundy and dark blue.
Her skin looks healthy.
Her thin, white hair brushed off her face.

After the nurse leaves, she looks at me
with wide eyes and asks,
“Do you want to play bridge? We need a fourth.”
“I haven’t played in years,” I say
She accepts that excuse
and points her long painted nails
to two or three other people
she imagines in the room.
“They will play,” she says.

I stroke her damp forehead,
holding her bony hand bruised from the needles
that had been stuck into it.
I brush my fingers down her white, silky legs,
now devoid of hair.
“Do I look a mess?” she asks.
The sun casts a shadow across her bed.
“No, you look wonderful,” I say.
She smiles at me, not minding
that her mouth has no bottom dentures,
and brags how her cousins
tell her how good she looks
and how well-dressed she is.
Even here with her gown hiked up to her diaper,
she cares.
I try to pull her gown down
but she keeps grabbing it.
I cover her with a sheet,
and sit down to watch her play cards.

“Six spades,” she proclaims,
“Play out.” I play out.
Using her night gown as her bridge hand,
she tries to lift off each pattern section
one by one as if it were a card
and place it on an imaginary table
in front of her.

I want to know what happened to her,
and what can be done about it.
“Hospitalitis,” the nurse says.
She has seen it a million times before.
I go back to the bed and continue play-acting.
I am thankful too. Her mind is taking her to that other place
where she is young and beautiful
and lives on the west side of Chicago.
“I like this little room,” she says.
“I’m glad,” I say.

Long Division

I gathered all the papers
piled on my desk for weeks
and put them into neat stacks –
Medicare receipts, bank statements, insurance policy,
taxes, unpaid bills, funeral records,
and a special pile called “Memorabilia” –
with her typed-up life story,
her citizenship decree,
and her husband’s death certificate.

We had already divided her things:
each piece of furniture,
each piece of silver,
china and jewelry laid out
and chosen one at a time.
My brother got the breakfront,
my sister the Illadro figurine
and I kept the diamond watch.

Letting Go

She flexed her fists
on the cold bed railing
keeping time
with her heartbeats,
Soon her hold relaxed,
and fingers intertwined
she wrapped her hands gently around the bar

Drugged from the morphine potion
placed kindly under her tongue
she lay there in a ball
like a sleeping skeleton,
head tucked into her sunken chest
I sat with her, stroked her arm
like a skinny rail itself
and soothed the damp hair
off her forehead until she pushed me away,
took hold of the railing again.

Finally too weak to reach her metal friend,
she allowed her folder fingers
to rest on the bed.
And I, kissed her gray, fading face.
A woman strong until the very end
took 94 years to finally let go.

Reaching for a Star

It used to be comforting to see her
at her computer as I passed her office door.
Sometimes we’d nod or say hello.
Other times I sat in her guest chair
against the wall and we’d chat.
I don’t remember about what –
our work maybe, her art projects, my poems,
or an exhibit one of us had seen
at the Getty, LACMA, a gallery at Bergamot Station.
Now her door is closed,
her name and title still on it,
but, she doesn’t work in there anymore.

Now we sometimes chat in her nice
third floor room in a tall building
on Prospect Avenue in Redondo Beach
with her favorite books around her
along with photos, writing papers, art supplies –
even a big screen TV –
all the comforts of home.

Not at a computer anymore,
she sits propped up
in bed in an aqua gown,
an oxygen tube in her nose
and a permanent IV shunt in her arm
to receive the doses of morphine
that increase day by day.
We look at the ocean as she tells me
her plans for her death.
Her ashes will fertilize several gardens
and her spirit,
happy to miss the daily catastrophes
of the living world,
will soar to her own personal star.
If all goes according to schedule,
she’ll be there in time for her 52nd birthday in August.

Paul’s Poem

You didn’t even touch me, Mother.
I was just down the hall,
sitting against the shower door
in the blue bathtub.
I was cold in there.
Why didn’t you touch me?
All you had to do was step
inside the bathroom.
I was still there
sitting on my box cutter
in a small puddle of blood.
I was dressed.
I still had on the clothes
I wore to work,
my white long-sleeved shirt and khakis.
It would have been okay if you came in.
You didn’t have to keep the door closed.
I was lonely in there.
You could have come in.

Why didn’t you come down to the garage
to kiss me goodbye?
Strangers from the coroner’s office
put me on a gurney
stuffed me in a plastic bag
and took me away.
I didn’t want to go,
but they had to make sure I was my murderer
not someone else.
You could have unzipped me down to my neck
and kissed me on the forehead or on my lips.
I wouldn’t have minded.
Even though my tongue was sticking out a little
I didn’t look too bad.

I know you weren’t allowed to visit
during my four days at coroner’s office,
but I don’t understand why you didn’t come
with Dad and Uncle Ken to the mortuary.
That was your last chance,
That was your last chance to see me whole
and you stayed home.
Why did you stay home, Mother?
Oh, sure, Dad probably told you to.
But you could have come anyway
How come, Mother?

I wanted you there with me
before they took me away for good
before they turned me into a bag of ashes.
Were you mad at me, Mother?
Were you mad that I did it?
Were you mad that I killed myself?
Were you frightened to see me dead?

Black Bomber

Swaddled in this
black bomber jacket all weekend,
I am safe from the Big Sur chill.
It’s too large for me.
And that’s okay. It was Paul’s.
I bought it for him
years ago at American et Cie on La Brea
before he went crazy
and decided to leave us
way before his time.
I like how it snuggles me,
like he’s in there too giving me a hug.
It’s the only piece
of his clothing I have left.
I’ve given away the rest:
his favorite plaid shirts
that smelled of sweat and smoke,
the torn jeans he salvaged
from second-hand stores,
his worn brown Doc Martin oxfords
that took him miles on his manic escapades,
and the tan suede jacket
he had me repair over and over
because he couldn’t let it go.
Like this jacket –
I’ll never let it go.
It has stains I can’t remove
and threads unraveling,
My son is gone.
But, this jacket –
try and take it from me.
Just try.

Three Cemeteries

On a cool, sunny day in Normandy
the breeze does not disturb
the graves at the American Cemetery.
No matter where you stand,
looking diagonally, horizontally,
or straight back and forth,
each alabaster white grave marker
each chiseled engraving
in perfect precision
and symmetry
as far as the eye can see.
The grass covering the graves
mowed just the right height
a shade of green
from a Technicolor garden.
The surroundings –
a rectangular reflection pool
the curved wall inscribed with the names
of 1,557 Americans missing in action,
the center bronze statue commemorating
the spirit of American youth,
and the Omaha Beach below –
create a restful setting
for the 10,000 allied soldiers
killed in 1943 or 44
during World War II.

On a gray, rainy day
in Prague,
hordes of tourists stroll
through the Jewish cemetery.
Their feet crunch
the brown and yellow leaves
covering the ground.
Housing 800,000 graves –
some over 12 layers deep –
this cemetery, not functional since 1787,
on the verge of collapse.
The packed gravestones lean
every which way
in a hodgepodge of rectangular, square,
and triangular shapes
so old, so worn and broken
the Hebrew or Yiddish markings
are hardly readable.
Just like the Jews
who were forced to live
crammed together in
the Prague ghetto,
these gravestones want
to escape the barriers
that keep the visitors and vandals out.

On a stormy day
in Los Angeles
we drive through the gates
of Hillside Cemetery
and curve around the drive
to the back wall
and a small plot
of miniature flat rectangular
gray and black marble gravestones
lying flush
with the closely cropped grass
marking the cremated remains
of fathers, mothers, aunts, uncles,
grandparents.

Full sun interrupts the downpour
just long enough
for us to kneel
at our son’s grave
on his December 31st birthday,
wipe away the raindrops,
leave a smooth black stone,
and four yellow roses
and allow our tears to fall.

Remembering Paul

I’ll always remember he slept
without closing his eyes all the way
I’ll always remember he walked fast
and way ahead of us
I’ll always remember he had long, thick, black eyelashes
surrounding clear blue eyes
I’ll always remember he played the piano
legs crossed at the knees, leaning
way down over the keyboard
I’ll always remember he liked to wear
second-hand clothes and didn’t mind
if they were ripped
I’ll always remember he stood
at the pantry door munching almonds
I’ll always remember he liked to climb –
trees, rocks, diving boards
I’ll always remember he was meticulous and anal about his things
I’ll always remember he could play almost any tune by ear
And that he was always a loner
And how much he loved his girlfriend
and wasn’t touched enough after she left him
I’ll always remember he was sensitive
I’ll always remember he drove too fast and erratically
I’ll always remember he got lots of parking tickets
I’ll always remember he was in love with John Lennon
I’ll always remember he liked Doc Martin shoes
I’ll always remember he tapped his foot when he sat down
I’ll always remember how he sat
all folded over like The Thinker
when he drank coffee at Starbucks
I won’t ever forget the feel of his cool pale skin
the last night I saw him
Or the sound of his voice
I’ll always remember his hair was thick
I can’t forget he knew all the nursery rhymes
by the time he was two
and he said he wanted to watch a record
when he lay down on the red and black plaid couch to take a nap
I’ll always remember he and his brother
called the back of the station wagon,
“the really back”
I’ll always remember he loved to fish.

A Poem That Wants To Be for Ben

They are always about Paul, my dead son
the one who died of his own free will
so many years ago.
My hordes of poems go on like a mantra:
his mania, depression, his delusions, escapades,
his suicide. They never fail to mention
his piercing blue eyes, the little half smile
that never showed his teeth, the smoky smell
and the way he slumped over the piano like the thinker
as he played.
Paul and his death have been my muse.

Ben’s living eyes brim over with love
as he looks down and folds me in his arms.
He is the son who says
I love you
every time we speak.
His smiles are wide
even when he faces disappointment
in his own life.
This son is the reason I choose to live.
Why isn’t he the reason I choose to write?

Twelve Hundred Head Shots

I scroll through them
one by one.
Each a full-face shot
in black and white.
His clothes change – tee-shirts,
dress shirt, tie and suit jacket,
a sweater slung over his shoulders,
a shirt with open collar and loose hanging tie.
But the poses repeat again and again.

First his face is serious, eyes slightly squinting,
looking dark and foreboding,
His hair slicked back
not one out of place.
This guy means business or he’s got a gun.
Next he shows a little half smile,
long dimples on the sides of his mouth
but no teeth.
Full, dark brows, deep,
friendly eyes
reflect the light of day.
Finally he smiles wide
showing teeth, dimples,
and crow’s feet
around the eyes. His jaw is long,
square, honest.
This is a guy
you can trust to be your friend
for life.

When this young son of mine
played tournament tennis as a boy
I sat on the sidelines at every match
with all my fingers crossed and my legs crossed
and my arm crossed
as if my body language and my wishing
could win him the point.

Now I click through the head shots
and wonder which one, which look, which outfit
will get him a part on a TV series
as a smart aleck lawyer or sinister gangster
or a part in a movie as the leading man’s sidekick
or better yet, the role perfect for the Tyrone Power,
Laurence Harvey,or Montgomery Clift type
that his new manager says he is –
the role that will find us both sitting together
at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion
on Academy Awards night.
He in his Hugo Boss tux,
I in my long Armani gown
waiting, holding hands,
squeezing them together until they hurt,
until his name is called
and he goes up on stage to accept his prize.

Making It Hard

The bright room is almost full.
Four walls of mirrors reflect women and men
in baggy shorts and sleek black tights.
The music so loud
the woman in front of me
stuffs ear plugs in her ears.
Lisa G says, “work from the core,
your workout relates to your real life.”
I want to get on with it.
I don’t come here at 6 a.m. to listen to a lecture.
The neon sign on the wall says, “sweat,”
and that’s what I want to do.
The woman behind me complains.
I don’t know her name, but she’s here every week.
Always in the same spot, always complaining, always in black.
Black tights, black sports bra, black thong leotard,
black headband on her head of black hair.
Even her lipstick looks black.

A drill sergeant in baseball cap and high-top aerobic shoes
Lisa begins her mantra.
“If it were easy, everyone would be fit,” she shouts
“Don’t come here and expect it to be easy.”
She doesn’t single me out.
I like it that way.
I like being anonymous here
I don’t know anyone and no one knows me.
Being anonymous is a benefit.
It keeps me in shape, calms my mind,
gives me the space to be myself.
It’s a mini vacation from the horrors of my life.
So, I thank Lisa G
for getting me moving,
for making it hard,
For making it hurt,
for helping me
trade one pain for another.

Meditation Practice

I face the shrine,
place my palms together
bow and walk into the room.
I choose a spot in the second row
and sit in the middle of a brilliant red cushion,
cross my legs, straighten my spine,
take a quick look around
before I gaze ahead,
lowering my eyelids until
my eyes focus on the gold leaf mandala
adorning the lacquered alter.
Soon the tang of incense sends up
a trail of smoke, like a fine silk thread.
It disappears above my head.

I begin to settle down and listen:
my breath moving in, moving out.
It sounds like I’m in an echo chamber.
This is not my breath. It’s the sound
of something far away.
I keep listening. The echo louder,
enveloping me, swaddling me
in its raspy arms.
I’m lost in this warmth until I startle,
my head lurches forward,
my eyes pop open, my body arches.
I barely catch myself
from keeling over.

The instructor at my side nods.
I unfold my legs,
and leave the room with him.
I sit with him in another room,
a smaller version of the shrine room,
to hear his lesson on how to meditate.
I try to listen carefully,
I try to stay focused,
I try to stay with him
and his words
but my mind is anxious to try again.

I take his words with me as I open
and close the creaking shrine room’s entry doors.
I go back to my spot and sit again,
I fold my legs again,
I straighten my spine again,
I fix my gaze again.
Yeah, I’m ready this time.
I can do this
if only my right ankle will stop
distracting me, aching, giving me fits.

Okay, focus, like the instructor said.
Pay attention to your breath.
If you get distracted,
count your breaths
cleanse your mind.
I must let my ankle hurt, let my nose itch,
and watch my breath move in and out
I must push invading thoughts aside.
Okay, take it easy,
Stay calm.
How hard is that?

The leader, sitting slightly elevated in front,
strikes the copper gong once, twice,
then produces several more short bursts of sound,
letting the prolonged vibrations permeate the air.
It’s time for walking meditation,
and boy am I ready for that.
I know I can do that.
My legs feel like a couple of stiff rails.
but, wait a minute.
Is this supposed to be a walk in the park?
No, of course not.

I enter the circle of my fellow meditators
walking the perimeter of the room.
I tuck my left thumb into my left fist
and cover it with my right hand,
holding my spooned hands close to my belly
just like I was told to do.
I begin to become aware of my feet
as I take slow step after slow step
around the room.
As I walk my arches rise,
my toes curl like a ballerina’s,
my feet are like wings made to propel me,
elevate me into a perfect pirouette. And,

I am there,
walking,
breathing,
getting it,
one step
one in breath
one out breath
at a time.

Prickly

“You’re prickly,” my husband said.
“hard to get along with
“and snappish.”
I just stood there, surprised.
“I’m sorry for being prickly,”
was all I could think of to say.

I am never so blunt
when critical of him.
He would retort as he’s done
so many times before,
“I guess I’m just not good enough,
“You should just find someone else,”
he’d say. And, of course,
I would quickly shut up,

I wonder what prickly means.
Do I hurt to the touch
like little pin pricks?
Do cacti envy my prowess?
Do the cats that roam the streets
and sleep under cars hiss
and scatter when they see me coming?
Do the few stars
that burn through the haze
look down at me in wonder?

A Summer’s Day in New York

My back is hot to the touch.
Still, the sun beats down
as the whole world strolls,
taking in the smells at the Union Square market.
Fresh basil, warm bread, cut flowers,
vegetables as vivid a still life,
all the way from New Jersey farms.
We go to breakfast at The Coffee Shop,
across from the square,
and eat mountains of eggs and crispy fried potatoes
while listening to live jazz.
Afterward, we head uptown on the subway
breathing in the soot, the pee stink,
and body odors
to see the Jackie O exhibit at the Met.
The lines are so long we huddle
against the wall for an hour,
but we don’t care a bit.
Then we push and shove our way through the crowds
just to get a glimpse of her clothes.
Over 80 dresses are there – by Givenchy, Cassini and
who knows how many other designers
who made those
60s A-shaped dresses in stiff fabrics
that hit just below her beautiful knees
or skimmed the floors she walked on
with matching coats or capes and little pill box caps
she wore way back on her head.
The sparkly strapless white gown,
its gauzy train
made her look like a fairy princess.
We think of her that way,
mouths open, teary eyed, watching
the clips of her upstaging her husband,
beaming at Nikita, Nehru, or Charles de Gaule,
speaking fluent French and Spanish
as she ignored those rumors about Marilyn.
Those were magical times for both her and me
before our tragedies changed everything.

We leave the Met
walk downtown on Madison Avenue
browsing, trying on dresses,
Jackie O sunglasses,
and shoes until
we can’t take another step.
So, we perch ourselves on bar stools,
sip some Chardonnay,
and watch the hordes of people go by.

Nadia

We sat across the table
covered with a white cloth.
Her bright face glowed in the light,
her smile radiant
punctuated by deep, long dimples
in each cheek.
Simply dressed in black slacks
and a white sweater
she spoke confidently in English.
And, when speaking her native Italian,
she spoke slowly so we could
understand her words.
At this first meeting
in the quiet La Casa Volpi Ristorante
just outside the city,
we ate heavy ribollita soup,
we dipped our bread in oil
from olives grown and pressed nearby,
we drank smooth, dark Chianti,
and we knew we would be friends.

We lingered, over biscotti and vin santo
giggling about our language goofs,
not wanting to end this evening
and our time in Arezzo in northern Tuscany.
When we parted
we embraced with hugs so tight
I knew she would forever
have a place in my heart.
She must have thought so too.

The next day, as we were leaving her city,
she told me she was giving me a piece of herself –
lavender she picked from her garden
packed in a heart-shaped sachet.

Black and White Dreams

I feel like snuggling in,
feet up on the coffee table
watching whatever inanity
the tube spews out
to attract me. Like the dashing
Paul Henreid lighting two cigarettes
as his eyes smolder in their glow,
Lauren Bacall flipping her hair
off her face
as she gives Humphrey
the come to momma look

There was a world one could live in,
black and white and out of focus,
where one could get lost in dreams.
We’d sing, we’d shout,
we’d kiss and do the Continental
down the wide boulevards of Rio.

All our endings would be happy
as the credits roll
over our bodies
locked in a smoky embrace.

Romeo and Juliet’s Wedding Night

The black drapes open
on center stage, a bed
covered in heavy red quilts and pillows
with a red satin cloth sweeping up
into the rafters from the headboard.
The bed covers and white sheets
crumpled in heaps
by the bodies of two lovers on top,
then underneath,
then on the pillows at the foot of the bed,
then on the floor
as they wrap their arms and legs around each other,
first one on top and then the other,
never separating as they kiss
and stroke each other
until almost daylight and it is time to part.
But still they don’t part.
While he buttons his shirt,
tucking it in half way,
she, wrapped in a sheet,
long dark hair covering her breasts like a halter,
her arms out to him,
kneels on the bed,
pleading, “Don’t go, not yet,”
calling to him to come back
crying in full soprano voice,
“It’s not light yet.”
And he turns around and looks into her eyes.
His tenor voice roars,
“Yes, I’ll stay,”
and he tears off his clothes again
leaps back onto the bed again
pushes her back down
and enfolds her in his arms — again.

At daybreak, finally getting up,
picking his clothes off the floor,
he dresses, this time for good.
He pulls her to him,
crushes her body against his,
jumps over the balcony
to the ladder.
He begins to climb down and stops,
looks back up at her on the bed,
the new light glow on her pale face.
He raises one hand to her.
She runs out to the railing,
Leaning, reaching, stretching her arms out to him,
until she almost falls over,.
Their fingers touch once more
before he climbs down and runs from her,
before the full morning light discovers them together
on this their wedding night.
And, we all know,
this was their last night together alive.

Across the Parking Lot, Into the Gym

5:30 A.M.
in the dark, the cold rain,
lines of cars jockey for the space
closest to the door.
The huge gray flatbed
always in the compact section
just to piss me off

Inside
blinding light reveals every pore,
frown, furrow,
sleepy eye, yawn, bed head
every drop of sweat,
every added inch
gained chomping on chips,
shoveling in the cookies
pizza pies, McAnythings.

The same folks line up
like race horses
in rows of stairsteppers
rows of treadmills
rows of elliptical trainers
rows of bikes
rows of rowers
ab crunchers, thigh shavers,
hip slimmers, arm deflabbers, chest expanders
dumbbells, barbells, bars with no bells
and no whistles.

They’re on slantboards, flat boards, balance boards,
wood floors, carpeted floors, balls, bozus
You ask what’s a bozu – it’s a half ball.
You have to be there.
They wear
baggy tees, baggy sweats,
long shorts, short shorts, tight shorts,
skin tights, tight tights,
bra tops, tank tops, see-through tops, no tops –
whoops, did I say that?
Really, they all wear tops.
Guzzling, suckling like babies
their sports drinks
from those ubiquitous plastic nipples.

They’re plugged in
to iPods, CDs, cassettes, radios, TVs.
Anything to drown out the drone
the cacophony of weights bouncing off the floor,
feet clip clopping on the treadmill,
Anything to miss
the macho guys yelling across the room,
ridiculing, riling up their buddies,
exposing their pecks
and their sex lives.
Anything to erase
the voice of the brunette with glasses
still gloating over W’s win –
The I told ya sos
And so what?
Others running, climbing, cycling, walking,
flexing, flaunting, strutting their siliconed stuff
The old geezers checking out the babes.
The comes ons, turn ons, hard ons and on and on.

They’re all there when I’m there
every morning
Day in, day out.
5:30 A.M.

Thirty-Eight Years

He folds her in his arms
and looks down at her
with his deep blue eyes
and a small, closed-mouth smile
that shows just the hint of dimples
in his ruddy cheeks
the way he looked
as he stood at her apartment door
on Mentone Avenue
that first night,
his hair
straw blonde, cut short,
stuck straight up,
his beige raincoat
damp from the March drizzle,
carrying a bottle of champagne
under his arm.

He remembers how
after drinking champagne
after dancing so slow they hardly moved
after she invited him
into her bed
they were up all night
exploring, tasting as they got to know
and feel every inch of each other
stroking faces, necks, thighs, feet,
kissing, mouths open,
almost swallowing each other,
coupling, coming, resting,
one on top, then the other,
spooned, joined
over and over again
until dawn and hunger
drove them out into the rain
to find a place to eat.

And though he admits nothing,
no nothing,
has ever come close
to that first night,
his memory of it
and the girl standing in the doorway
with short dark hair,
a tight-fitting yellow dress,
black patent-leather stiletto pumps,
keep them joined together
now.

Tonglen Practice

It’s the mothers and fathers I care about.

When my son died, I grieved for him
and all mothers and fathers
who ever lost a child.
I breathed in pain,
and with each exhalation prayed
that no parent
would have to feel
the pain of such a loss again.

But I can’t do it alone.
The mothers
and fathers
over all the world
must practice Tonglen with me.

We must take the pain into our bodies,
into our souls, into our hearts,
and cleanse it with our healing breath.
Then with our collective breathing out
give this world a chance
to be safe for all our children –
all our sons and daughters.

Breathe in, breathe out
now, forever,
breathe.

Most self-proclaimed poets today don’t have the vaguest clue about what a poem is.

If you were to ask 1,000 writers who call themselves poets to tell you just what they think a poem is, you might get 3,000 different answers.

And then you’d have to decide which of those answers was right.

Ask yourself what you think a poems is.

Is it definable?

If so, what is it?

How does one describe it?

How does one write it?

And after you think you have written one, ask yourself if it’s worth reading and if it’s worth remembering.

People who don’t write poetry might say a poem has to be rhymed, in lines and stanzas, and filled with musical language.

Does this statement tell you what a poem is?

Maybe it’s a statement about poetry and not about poems.

Does poetry have to be musical to be poetry?

What is poetry?

Is there a difference between poetry and poems?

If so, what is the difference between poetry and poems?

Can one write a poem that has no poetry?

Can one write poetry that is not a poem?

Can any piece of writing be a poem?

When does writing become poetry?

When does poetry become a poem?

Do well-known poets always write poems when they are writing poetry?

And when they are writing poetry, is it really poetry?

And are all of the pieces of writing in their poetry books actually poetry or poems?

If you read someone’s so-called poetry, can you call it poetry?

What is poetry?

Can it be called poems?

What is a poem?

How does one write a poem?

Does a poem have lines and stanzas, or lines and no stanzas, or sentences and stanzas, or sentences and paragraphs, or just lines, or just sentences, or just words, or just syllables, or just letters, or maybe just punctuation without words like the piece Hemingway wrote?

Can one write a poem without words?

How many words does a piece of writing have to have to be called a poem?

Can a poem be just one word?

If a writer writes only one poem, can that writer be called a poet?

How many poems does a writer have to write to be called a poet?

Is there a difference between a poet and a poetry writer?

If a writer writes only poetry and not poems, can that poetry writer be
called a poet?

Is a poem a piece of writing that moves the reader?

Does a poem move the reader emotionally and intellectually?

If a poem moves the reader emotionally and not intellectually, is it still a
poem?

If a poem moves the reader intellectually and not emotionally, is it still a
poem?

If a poem doesn’t move the reader at all, can it still be a poem?

If a poem has no poetry in it, is it still a poem?

What is a poem?

A poem first of all is a story with a beginning, a middle and an end but not necessarily in that order.

And today usually but not always a poem is a lyrical poem that is a short short story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

And maybe that lyrical short short story is inhabited by people just like long story poems called epics.

But a lyrical poem can also be a story about the beauty, ugliness, indifference or cruelty of nature.

A poem can be a story about anything!

A poem can be written in any writing style and still be a poem.

But for a piece of writing to be a poem it must have a beginning, a middle and an end!

A poem telling a story about a thought, a feeling, or a moment’s insight has a beginning, a middle and an end.

Of course any of these three parts can be implied and need not be explicitly expressed.

Most pieces of writing passed off as poems today are just fragments of poems.

They are beginnings without middles or ends.

They are beginnings lost in middles looking for an end.

They are middles and ends without beginnings.

They are lines of words that neither begin nor end any complete thought or feeling let alone a story.

They are thoughtless storyless solipsistic soliloquies seemingly straight out of diaries and journals.

Can diary and journal excerpts be poems?

Sure, if they have a beginning, a middle and an end.

But almost all diary and journal writing masquerading as poems are just fragments of poems.

Poetry editors today are daily bombarded by bits and pieces of poems.

And when poetry editors do occasionally find real whole poems in their submissions, most of these real poems just belabor the obvious.

They do not GRAB MINDS and HEARTS.

GRAB means no cliches, no platitudes, no worn-out stories, no maudlin sentiments, no mawkish mumbo-jumbo-gumbo, no dead-but-not-buried hodgepodge-garbage-barrages, no elliptically elliptical musings that say nothing, no elegant excreta, no grandiloquent gobbledegook, and no googoogaga.

GRAB means original stories clothed in magical language telling you something you have not heard before or telling you in a creative way and from a fresh new perspective something you already know.

GRAB centers your consciousness and kickstarts your imagination!

GRAB smax you with WOW!

Copyright 2008 by Larry Ziman
Permission to reprint with acknowledgment

1. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Is A Waste Of Paper And Ink.
2. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Is A Waste Of Time And Space.
3. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Have Been Written.
4. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Have Been Published.
5. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Be In Bookstores.
6. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Be In Libraries.
7. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Be Kept On A Shelf.
8. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Be Kept On A Table.
9. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Be Kept In A Drawer.
10. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Not Be Read.
11. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Be Thrown Out.
12. This Unreadable Book Of Illiterary Gibberish Should Be Forgotten Forever.

Copyright 2008 by Larry Ziman
Permission to reprint with acknowledgment