most recent first Author Bionotes
Pumpkins
Arhats
squatting around in an open field
each flushed with protests
against frost coming all too soon
Buddha puts you there
to guard an entire season
but we will relocate you
to guard our rented houses
the last of a fast fading landscape
the last to ripen printable
Changming Yuan
Canticle for the Wabash Valley
Driving home at dusk I see the clouds of midge grow damp
in the last thin haze. A low plane banks some silent distance away
and the corn sways silver above the curving road.
The tiger lilies have been tamed
by August heat and the blackberries offer
only chiggers and a brace of thorns.
There were days when driving was an art
and Id take restless, reckless trips through sleeping
towns and countryside. Dark shops waited
for the early birds, and parking lots cast light against the bellies
of water towers. I was not a god, not even a small one,
but I sent blessings out into space and wished a good life to every friend,
the minor miracles of fidelity and a comfortable bed,
a boss that didnt kick or bite, graves that remain
unused. I passed the empty car wash and the homely beauty
supply store. I passed the city park and its delinquent, noisy geese.
I turned the car where the road grew fat,
backtracked through the recent past, headlights
clipping guardrails, the blue reflectors at the ends of driveways.
God hid behind the moon. The radio played a soft gospel
of static. I drove on as if movement itself were prayer. printable
Brent Fisk
Swisher Sweets
In back of Jacks Crab Shack,
a man wrings out bar towels
and smokes a Swisher Sweet.
The trumpet vine run riot
over the faded paint façade.
At dusk the rabbits grow
suicidal as the Mennonites empty
cash boxes from unmanned fruit stands
and the shadows of highway signs stretch east
forever.
The aroma of cheap cigars
and corn silk brings back five generations
weve lost to the soil of southern Indiana.
Dainty aunts in pillbox hats file past
open-faced coffins, patting the shoulders of the dead,
crying into embroidered kerchiefs,
How natural.
In the ground beneath the elementary s
new cafeteria my father lost an eye tooth on a see saw.
Also my Grandmothers diamond engagement ring
twinkles in the darkness next to unsuspecting worms.
One whole summer of my youth the churches roiled and grumbled
until the grade school changed its name from the Red Devils to the Vikings.
Overnight we went from Gentleman Callers to Northern marauders.
Now my feet grow dirty beneath a porch swing in Kentucky.
Trucks rumble past and frighten the pop-eyed kitten.
A haze holds sway over a field of hay
and I have come to love my rough forefathers
the way I have come to love flour dusting a butcher-block table,
and the blaze of tiger lilies crowding a cobalt vase.
The cool spot downhill of the cistern where chickens scratch for feed.
Dreams are heady as creek beds in August
and the moon rises slow as an old man
whose visit has ended. He says again to the ears of the unlistening
corn, I guess its time I headed home. printable
Brent Fisk
Confession
I can tell you now
that you are my favorite.
You have outlasted all the rest.
As a boy I said straight to your face
that I loved my other grandmother but you
not at all. In an instant you grew taller
and more distant, but I bounced away
to the playroom and gouged the eyes
of my mothers forgotten dolls.
Now you shrink and close in on yourself.
You set your face to the light. The empty hours
pull the dust around them like a shawl. printable
Brent Fisk
Bagpiper abrupt
bagpiper abrupt in the rental wind
strained as relatives with itineraries
dour before downpours in university drainpipes
during tennis season’s plaid of plans
in the city clannish with singles
the highroad grin and golf game
knee-ripped denims now-you-see-him-now
you-don’t like the bagpiper’s croon
and hush the women are on the low road
in quiet cacophony one is edgy as a kilt
the berserk solos sporadic as departures
when women have forwarding addresses
up north the bagpipers process
like a grandfather ghost at the French horn
with the ethnic utterance the strangers go
some curling with brooms and bad weather
one sees a bagpipe-o-gram delivered
out-of-custom under lilac hedges
and the drumming of rain jagged
an obligato like divorce the shut door
that obviates any fear of lightning printable
Katherine L Holmes
The way
the oak leaf
fell, body curled and finned,
diving down curved currents – a small brown
trout: the dogwood blossoms
floating high
above.
James Cox
Reminders
That scorpion must have ate some bad shrimp, our youngest son
advised me while fighting game demons. Better get on the monkey boat.
Where’s my camera? Superior, spontaneous taunt, calling.
Easy. Unaffected. Beckons should be a noun, it’s pull
too strong for secondary grammatical roles. The beckons.
Daily reminders line up. Too often, I wait to board. The bus is always there.
Paydays and all good things, best served bi-weekly, or on some regular schedule. Taken? Given? Earned? Earnest money is my favorite. Earnest conversation is close but more rare. More rare, remainders of pre-bitter-ed points of view.
Remnants of invention. Another favorite all time grace happens when non singers let you hear them sing. They bring that open season.
Better get on. Can I get on today? I mean, will I? I need the monkey boat.
I need elite transport, with Buffalo style haircuts for windy days. Inhibit limits approach.
The talky vent said I want you, while she only pays attention to waxing.
The ideal compliment, reasons we waited, and the
positive effects of spiky-haired cartoon beauties are better described by
the voice of a thing in motion. printable
Mark Noble
Enfleurage
The language of morning has arrived.
Forget the flowers climbing through
the screen mesh
to sit in our laps.
The wail of the sun beyond the poplars
where the river is a long shadow.
All is surplusage.
We rise and attend to the day’s duties.
Out of clutter find simplicity
Einstein wrote,
and so we brush our teeth and imagine
that the body
is a skylight created to protects us
from the stars.
Who can say that the soul
wasn’t constructed originally
from polypropylene?
Then after that, nothing. We climb aboard
the bus or stand
with our hands in our pockets.
Our ritual is to believe
we are wading into our lives.
Are swimming. printable
Doug Ramspeck
Boomers
After we cut our wrists, drank antifreeze, shot ourselves in the temples, left our bodies hanging from backyard trees,
engaged in unrequited loathing toward our parents,
read coffee-stained volumes of Gide and Marcuse and Camus,
licked Colorado River toads,
we were set adrift in our lives and found ourselves becalmed:
the ashy coat of night settling around our bodies and making of these hours a kind of sleep,
the incisions in our chests where they cut out our lungs to form this reliquary.
These emptied husks of days, the yellow anesthesia of a moon,
the years drifting down like autumn leaves—wind ferried and desiccated.
How the years pass, and the art of a life plays itself like the clarinet we abandoned in tenth grade,
like the crows gathering as bored auguries in our nightly dreams
when we see our dead mothers floating past in the river, their hair tangled with soggy leaves,
how they look at us with disappointment in their eyes and say we have grown thin,
how our fathers have been reduced to ashes in their briefcases.
And we awake some days with parts of our bodies missing. A toe or finger that has given up, turning black as an old pear.
Or we imagine our lives as the rain that accumulates in puddles in the back yard, leaving the grass soggy.
The empty vessel of these mornings when we awake to the sun interrogating us.
While our tongues have been buried in the back yard beneath the tomato plants, and our hearts are growing green on the vines, the size of fists.
And we are like sailors abandoned at sea, waiting for any sight of land. printable
Doug Ramspeck
Because There Is Red
The 'red-cock-will-crow-in-this-house' cushion
is sprayed with claret.
We all rest
in a drop the colour of magic,
reddened in the womb's wadding.
The coffin's inmost recesses
are chiffon rouge.
Jupiter's storm spot rolls
heart-felt to run fingers over.
Aura's simmer above red,
chamber-dream snug.
Hazard symbols on butterflies.
Curfew street lamps ply it,
a red 'stop' is in me.
You're absorbed by sea water
in that red-light dress. print
Christopher Barnes
Sensed
all shut-eye ain’t sleep; all good-bye ain’t gone – Gullah saying
First the boy, his color dark
as the night he is running in
still covered in muck to remove his scent, still
scampering among the undergrowth of palmetto and slash pine
then suddenly up a live oak
where his body folds to match a high twisted limb.
His breath held, he does not move nor does his story,
in fact, for two centuries the scene has been repeating itself.
The dogs are always fooled.
Ghost dogs, let loose, the same old pack,
their noses still scouting his scent, still running
into the same eerie swamp, always racing past the live oak
where the slave boy is hiding, still
continuing through the old grove with its dangling moss
going deep into mists where, finally, they
slow down, disappear.
Nothing ages. Not the place, the boy, nor dogs.
Nothing leaves because the boy has never left because
it takes awhile to erase a cruel history.
Behind the pack, apparitions, a group
of filmy-white men, long gone yet raised up with rifles,
the poorest of the low country, their mouths open
in the same angry shapes, still yelling,
it is their job you know, something
they are paid to do with their dogs
a language the wind has agreed to carry over
into this century, we hear it you know
sic ‘em, sic ‘em that noise
coming like a hoard of insects
we keep brushing off. printable
Therése Halscheid
Reading the Stones
Bishops Beach – Homer, AK
In the journal I wrote of the beach half-frozen in middle March,
of walking its hardened surface, and the way of my walk,
the timeless strides, crossing the snow-covered sands to Kachemak Bay.
I wrote of the bay’s silvery current, the forming of small lips of water
and what they mouthed.
In the journal is a section about the cobbles, in the section, I tell
of so many stones, cold and black, shiny as patent leather.
There is mention as to why they were gleaming, that I thought it so
because of the tide which rose and receded, it washed over
leaving a film that iced instantly in the Alaskan air.
Nearing the end of the page is a line which reads: Above, the sun
burnt the beach bright, but the thin sheet
of the ice on the stones did not melt. And it was so.
All this I wrote, of the curling of water, of the shapes of the cobbles,
then added, but the look of them were beyond stones, more like beings
come ashore, gathered to talk with us as if they have something to say.
I had reached the end of the page at this point, and needed to turn it.
On page two, at the very top, I wrote once more of the water,
how when the Spring thaws the sea, the first waves are for drinking
because the salt sinks and the top is fresh. This, I learned in Alaska.
It was told to me and was true I could tell.
Think now what I understand.
Think of the pen moving hurriedly across the paper because the scenes rush
to the page sometimes, too fast for the hand.
Further on, are two paragraphs explaining how necessary it was
to be a little by myself, to stand in the shallows
becoming bright-eyed by the water’s edge.
I stood bundled in borrowed clothes, I wrote,
while the north wind I breathed
moved under my skin.
Of the stones … they appear time and again.
In one account, I pause over them staring as I would with meadow-flowers,
bent over, so very low, yielding to something hard to explain.
Something the stones held within them.
And this I wrote of, for I realized learning was a bodily thing.
On page three, I include an important story of The Real People,
which is the meaning of the word, Eskimo, and how
they considered the stones as oracles from the sea.
They could read the strands of white granite running through
as lines of luck and erotic messages. They could turn a stone belly up
and something was known from a single touch.
I began touching the stones and on page four I talk of this.
Whatever is realized is right, I wrote, and so we touch
that our eyes, our hands will know what the stones have given of themselves,
the white lines like paths for us
to follow their rocky truths. printable
Therése Halscheid
no recess
leaves rot
are filled
with children relic old father
raw
bursting tosses
through piles
flutters unbalanced
unmeaning beneath
of brown undressed
confusion they all smell the decay collapsing on all sides branches
shallow grave
Brian Edward Bahr
A Brief Stretch
every regular
was at that upstate simulcast
facility the day
the screens went blank &
the lights went off:
power outage
rendering
the betting machines useless &
after a brief stretch
of hope for restoration
I felt urged to leave:
we could be victims
of fire or a bomb
we could bet at the OTB
2 towns north
but no one was easing with me
toward the door
those who normally stood taking seats
predictions of winners of Belmont’s next race
replaced by eulogies
of champs
I grew sure
there’d be argument:
they wouldn’t be able to handle
not having the kick
of explicit odds against them
& soon they
did argue
but it was nothing
vicious
just one telling another
what really happens after
prostate surgery
then there was nothing but
gentle talk
as if we were all
again under some camping
trip tent:
summertime
lights out
a night’s sleep
our worst enemy printable
Mark Wisniewski
Maize Amaze
A whole body of teeth
Nothing but teeth
To chew the passing summer
We bite off from you
All the pearl-like memories
Tinged with sunlight
A hard but juicy kiss printable
Changming Yuan
For Years
For years we have had only this to drink:
The emptiness which passes through our hands
Like water, our main proof that time is wet.
We have had this skin which tends to shrink,
These bones that melt, this stomach which demands
Light. We had these teeth we like to bet,
These eyes which train our memories to blink,
This heart which our own blood misunderstands.
All of these were ours, our own, and yet
We possessed much less than one might think.
Just this rain which falls through us and lands
In puddles, this translucent alphabet. printable
Stephen Lefebure
Slow Stitch Across a Widening Distance
And long is the season of longing,
And the thought is of onions
And the dream is of skin,
its peeling and getting through
Spheres of influence, say, the quiet side of tracking
A man in orbit—
the distant pitch of the tilt-a-whirl.
And the yawn vouches for a salty cheek,
And there is hushed,
And there is room for praise:
A space
In the flesh-heavy universe
For simple injuries—days like layovers
Spent hanging in his sway,
Highways wracked with overgrowth, landscapes that say
Time to move on,
Only to be driven again;
But,
There are momentary places for patience, whole planets
That can be left for looming
In the scrim of prairies, some wild chives and dry irises—
Cicatrices of name ( )—
Yes, the heart is a flood-plain, I remember
The planet said he wants no part—not to be held or behold
Now a tiny spectacle, a disturbance of water in the distance…..
And him and me and all the onions—
Cutting them to cover—
And that splashing in the background is his lover,
Learning now to swim. printable
Alec Hershman
Like Jacob Grasping Esau
Your twin brother is always leaving the womb ahead of you,
So you clutch his heel as he emerges. You don’t want birthright,
You want to face the light with one who also faced the darkness.
If the desert winds don’t kill you, they’ll still scatter your bones.
All life is erosion, all flesh sandstone, and Eden’s an oasis
You’re either leaving or seeking, but nevertheless is miles away.
The charmer keeps playing for fear of the cobra’s flange and hiss.
That rhythm is the only thing out here that will save your life.
Once bitten, your arm darkens to night sky, and you roam the stars.
Flaubert loved the camel, a giraffe with the stuffing knocked loose,
Steeped in its own stench, ornery enough to survive a waterless month.
He spent weeks mimicking its spittlesome call. The angels tuned in.
Saints see the desert as home. Pioneers find a wasteland to skirt.
Ten thousand years burnished each sand grain to a mirror.
The Bedouins merely walk on, staring beyond ranks of mirages.
Along the dunes, sidewinders have inked a calligraphy of names.
The sun is trying to explain what transpires in the heart of a star.
Out here, your only birthrights are wind and the endless heavens. printable
Temple Cone
The parachute, not as a landing device
In a slippery desk drawer
lined with avocado fat
fastened by a diary lock
is an unopened parachute.
A soldier couldn’t ask for a sandwich
or leave anything but a tooth under his pillow
so he escaped.
Sometimes cacti confuse hunger with thirst.
This is a side effect of photosynthesizing.
The soldier mastered the art of bulb-tuning
and found some light makes microscopic animals
seem artificial.
My sister plants perennials back home,
but I’m never there for her
to have something to show for it.
A soldier comes home
with a cumulus on his back
but no one has missed him.
The parachute gets us nowhere
but nowhere is somehow safe. printable
Jaimie Gusman
a friendly reminder
I called her on the phone
and she
touched herself
she touched herself
I called her on the phone
and she laughed from surprise
in those skin-piercing
eyes
she colored hazel today
I called her on the phone
and she asked me questions
that didn’t matter,
told me stories I didn’t care about
or even want to hear
I called her on the phone
and she realized she was
broken,
had been for four months
and exactly eleven days
I called her on the phone
and she
touched herself
she touched herself
to feel her veins printable
Zachary Lundgren
A Poem About What Really Happened
So he let go of the woman he loved. After all,
she would’ve only been lost in the muddled life
he’d made for himself. Maybe even hurt.
That was not something he wanted for her.
None of it was, really.
Wait, though, that isn’t how it happened.
He never let the woman go. On the dark wooden steps
he offered her the idea of a tinderbox
and a match, then a circus beneath a Big Top
where he balanced the universe
on a tightrope made of shoestrings and bones.
He told her a bedtime story about places
like ever after and far away. Then he built four walls
out of promises and tape where she curled up
atop his words and wept. Where then she dreamed
of something suspended over water—
A thousand origami cranes in cobalt and chartreuse,
the tiniest paper airplane, tall bridges beckoning
toward an island made of glass.
From somewhere distant, she dreamed of going.
And he followed.
Wait, though. That isn’t how it happened. printable
Kristina Moriconi
Not Just
Not just Shabbat evening NOW, but
endless generations out of everywhere
here, ghost more real than flesh and blood,
the genetic swirl of Belsen alwaysness.
Hugh Fox
The Hair
The hair that never greys and breasts,
eyes, labia, legs that never autumn, that
snow that spring melts every day, the word-hands
every day (byting) find newfound lands of daily
revelation that Homer, Tchekov, Verlaine it from
a forever deathlessness. printable
Hugh Fox
Rose for Water
At midnight I rose for water and a peek at the moon.
A soft sniffle greeted my return to our cotton nest.
I tucked myself along my love’s smooth back.
He turned in his sleep, stretching like a cat,
and put his delicate face on my shoulder.
His peppermint breath caressed my neck
as his right hand slid silently across me,
gently coming to rest between my breasts.
I counted my blessings in the dark
and sent another prayer toward the peeling ceiling:
Please, God, let me keep this. Please let me keep this.
God leaned down and winked at me, with a grin as big as a galaxy.
Gal, relax and get a good night’s sleep. I guarantee you’ll need it
when that man wakes you up in the morning. printable
Kiesa Kay
Pantoum: Carson McCullers and Misanthropy at Yaddo
An odd child, I sprawled in bed, conjured her square pale face,
Propelled myself into her enormous dark eyes
And imagined, for years, that I curled inside her mind.
At Yaddo I drank sherry from a thermos, strode lank-legged
Like Carson, propelled myself into her enormous dark eyes
Then picked up my pen, clutched it left-handed, awkwardly Carson-like.
At Yaddo, I drank sherry from a thermos, meandered lank-legged,
Strolled the rose gardens alone, talking to Carson, still dead from her stroke.
I picked up my pen, clutched it left-handed, awkwardly Carson-like.
At Yaddo I wandered friendless, alone, the other writers scapegoating me,
Toured the Mansions cavernous rooms imagining McCullers as my friend.
The other guests played Scrabble while I hunched in my darkening studio.
At Yaddo I wandered friendless, alone, the other writers scapegoating me
And imagined, for hours, that I curled inside her mind.
The other guests played Scrabble while I hunched in my shadowed studio.
An odd woman, I sprawled in bed and conjured her square pale face. printable
Terri Brown-Davidson
Pantoum: Staying in David Michael Kaplans Studio at the Millay Colony
My husband said, "Like a child, youre eerily impressionable."
I demurred, paced in the pink-canopied bedroom,
Stooped to examine the name pen-scrawled on the doorjamb.
I stayed up all that night, read "Doe Season" fifteen times.
I demurred, paced in the pink-canopied bedroom.
Kaplans tour-de-force catapulted me toward Writer Euphoria.
I stayed up all that night, read "Doe Season" fifteen times.
That night, Andys shot doe tiptoed closer.
Kaplans tour-de-force catapulted me toward Writer Euphoria.
When I sat down to write, an ersatz "Doe Season" flowed from my pen.
While I slept, Andys shot doe tiptoed closer.
I shivered, conjured the does huge heart pulsing red between my fingers.
When I sat down to write, an ersatz "Doe Season" flowed from my pen.
I stooped to examine the name pen-scrawled on the doorjamb.
I shivered, conjured the huge doe heart pulsing red between my fingers.
My husband said, "Like a child, youre eerily impressionable." printable
Terri Brown-Davidson
