To the fourth floor ascends 
the world's slowest elevator, 
through violin makers, 
costumers, and MDs specializing 
in repetitive motion disorders, 
to the place where music is made possible, 
but not made. 
 
She has come to restring a bow for her doctoral 
recital; the tall gnome who guards the secrets 
tells her its tip has cracked. 
Worse comes to worse, I say, you buy a new one. 
$10,000, she says, for a new one. 
 
Cases of bows swing on a pivot. 
Octagonal and round sticks, their backs 
bent over heat to form a concave curve, 
rest in brackets. Around them floats dust, 
horsehair, heat, leavings from Brazilian pernambuco. 
Each has its ebony frog, inlaid with mother of pearl, 
ivory tip, leather grip, maker's mark. 
 
As I look, the shop fills with elves and sprites 
that dance in the late afternoon sun--
 it swims through the dusty window in golden streams 
the color of weak green tea or late harvest hay-- 
to the shivered longing of one held note.

                                            -LAUREL PETERSON

                                                 Poet Lore 

PAYING THE ELF TRIBUTE

When they bought the summer house,
he found it first:
a hollowed out tree trunk
five feet into the forest
that stretched like a rubber band
around their ring of meadow.

It’s an elf house, he told her,
his only daughter,
his only child.
We must pay tribute
to keep mischief away.

Every year,
when school spilled out its charges,
and father and daughter were both freed
to move into the warm, secret days
and hushed, cool nights of the mountains,
they would make their way
five feet into the forest
to leave a shard of sea-rubbed glass,
a branch of silvered wildflowers,
a petrified charm tied on silk ribbon
at the elf house door.

The year her old cat died,
she left its collar
—to keep the new kitten safe, she told him.

The night she graduated high school,
a boy she loved died;
the highway and alcohol
loved him more than she could.
In college, a friend slid off an icy road.
Later, her grandparents, one by one.
For each, the elves received tribute, memorial.
After each came new love, a child.

Then came her father’s cancer,
the long, slow descent into absence.
He had retired by then
to the summer house made year round.
How was one to know what elves needed
as recompense for this?

She left husband and child to care
for each other, took charge
of swabbing pus from wounds,
washing his sheets of blood and vomit,
prying truth from doctors.
Every so often, she would slip
to the forest’s edge
to leave a talisman
in the small pile of tokens
that represented a life:
a 1945 penny, his Navy wings,
the gold pen she’d given him
when he turned forty, and
in one final desperate act,
as he lay evaporated almost to bone,
his wedding band from the mother
who had died before her daughter could know her.

He slipped away that night.
Perhaps that was the elves’ gift
for the ring. In the morning,
when she went to retrieve it,
angry at their treachery,
in the pile of fading glitter, sheen and decay,
it alone was gone
into the warm, dark heart
of the forest.

-Laurel Peterson
Prairie Winds

POCKETWATCH, c. 1905

Round, etched rose gold,
too heavy for any modern
Tawainese-sewn pocket,
your gift weights my palm,
a drill-punched circle of heavy heart,
ticking just slower than time.

It arrived after the towers collapsed
and my lover’s wife had died
and I had won him
in a terrible lottery
that left me holding the ticket,
stunned and silent and so afraid
that time had already run through my illicit
fingers, slippery, gelatinous.
Could I lose him twice
to grief?

You watch across the reflective mirage of distance,
wondering, warm like the heavy inevitable tomorrow,
like the parentheses I know
I’ll find under my pillow
when I’m changing the sheets,
the future I won
and can never possess.

My shameful inadequacy to love sufficiently
slopes away in pathetic disorder:
a mountainside littered
with glass and gravel.

The watch ticks—
that’s my life passing.
What do I do with my longing?
Its impractical desires bend
in all directions at once,
a sparkler fizzling in the night air.

-Laurel Peterson
The Texas Review

			THE MIRACLE	Index

I woke up this light June morning praising the world--
sun pouring down
through the green-lit trees,
hills lofting their heads
into fresh-tinted blue,
clouds on their long white journeys
nowhere--

At breakfast, in the soft slant light
of morning,
heads of my children shine
like the children of gods.
Half shyly I glance at them,
admiring with what ease they lift their hands--
how their mouths open and speak.

Milk in the beaded glasses, white and tall--
Bread crumbling in my hands--

When the meal is through
I walk through the glowing rooms,
feasting on lights and shadows--
clear moving depths, gashes of mote-thick gold,
enchantments of hallways blossoming
into farther rooms--
then pass outside
into day.

The scent-rich breezes touch me with rippling fingers.
I walk on green blades of grass
that curl beneath my feet,
touch the bark of trees,
bend down and cup in my hands
furry backs of flowers,
moist-glittering, cool.

The air is alive with blackbirds, grosbeaks, jays,
sun-speckled whistlings.
Wherever I walk the moist earth heaves beneath me--
The sun follows me--
Poised on the brimming edge of my own body
I could overflow
and like some fountain spill
into this curling world of living green--

to feed dark roots,
to melt into the secret hearts of stones.

-Paul Petrie
Michigan Quarterly Review

			A VISION OF HORSES AND MULES	Index

Learn to think like a horse
her trainer had said. She went
into the pasture at noon,
when her horses lay down to sleep
without fear of coyotes,
without fear. They sensed her
but did not mind as she stretched
out beside them with the June
heat's broad strong hand
flattening her into the grass.

But now, she said, I am studying
mules. Her trainer told her
horses forget everything by
and by. Mules never forget.
Carry your intention carefully,
a brimming bowl of water.
Mule skinner, I called her
and from my childhood I saw
a tin of Boraxo my father used
to clean grease from his hands.

Twenty-mule teams crossed
the Death Valley of our bath
room, little black mules along
the bottom of the tin, the driver
in his wagon, the whip cracking
a wicked S in the air. I'm a mule:
stubborn, dragging heavy grudges,
joys and lost friends from the alkaline
mines of my past across the bleak
present to some future use.

-Marge Piercy
Ploughshares

			AS FROM A QUIVER OF ARROWS	Index

			IMPROPER ELEGY	Index

The circuitry of frost on the kitchen window
and the thought that hums inside it

A cold night, a dead night.
Snowfalls shower of data in the yard

the freezing corpseflowers, pasteflowers,
the blooms that nod and sleep on their stems

until each petal dies gratefully into the windowbox
I dont know what to do

with the doomed, the chilled over and gone,
but drink until my fingers become twigs

and, like twigs, snap.



Someone cut a hole in my head and poured a poison
in,
so the kitchen becomes

the sum of all its information: The onion,
asleep in its paper skin, the wine, the knives

that smile in the drawer. The refrigerator hums
and loves the winter weather, the snow

and flowers that make a deathbed of it,
woolflowers, hatflowers, the dying fisted rose.

A pulse of information.



A drink would be perfect right now,
and another, to take me out the back door

and into the snow
where Id stand in my slippers and watch

pills fall from the sky. The cold air undoes
the throat and makes me blink. A wind coughs

in the trees. What have I done with my time?
You have been dead a year now

so I hardly think about you anymore.
Lookthe houselights are glowing.

They glow like angry little screens.
 

-KEVIN PRUFER
BOULEVARD
 

______________________________


PRAYER


Youll find me in a suitcase. Youll find me in a
car.
Lord, unbend my legs. Lord, lift me so I see.
The red moon in winter is the memory of candles,
the sky like church windows the sun nods through.
Lord, youll find me in a dead car. Ill be gone in
the trunk,
birds around my head and a mouthful of glass.
Birds that spin the head, Lord, and blood on my
chin.
Am I ugly like this, hands roped at the back? My
eyes
closed tight? Touch my face with your palm,
with your rough old hands that worked too hard
A car in the field where the weeds grow high,
the trunk closed tight so no air gets in. Unknot
me,
lift me to a glassy sky. Your lovely mallet arms
I cant describe the arms that you must have.
 

-KEVIN PRUFER
FIELD

___________________________________________



APPLE TREES AND SWEET

The little death in the apples core says Darling,
says Sweetheart, all wrapped around its juice.
A slick breeze sways the tree, unpastes the leaves.
Oh, ticket the pick-up windshields with apple
leaves,
kiss the boys in the trucks with chlorophyll and
veins.

The world is falling falling like gluey twigs.
The bees devour the flowers or sting them
into rot while high on a branch, the little death
in the apples core says, Sweet, says, Touch me
and Ill fall. All around, thin boys in trucks

idle at stop lights or look blankly toward the
trees.
Cover their trucks with leaves and falling apples,
splatter them with rot and seed and flesh.
The boys grow sleepy. Their engines growl
while the death in every apple explodes its core.

-KEVIN PRUFER
COURT GREEN
 

			WATER MUSIC after John Ashbery	Index

 

I can do what I want to do, but I want to stay
here, said someone’s girlfriend, draped as
a piece of real technology.   Yes, she nearly
danced as a river, following one arm to the
estuary’s break; or pasting a quilt of refractive
light upon many square inches of her body.
A scarfskin map lies infinite, and a river
turns like mercury in the mind:  it shines
there as folklore, as floodgate, as copper foil
for beach-glass.  This is why we say Her name
is Rio, and why I’m learning love requires
a trawl-net, an act of free will.  Someone
is singing at the dark end of the street,
the velvet of her voice covered over.

                                -Christina Pugh
                                New Orleans Review 
                                                                                                      

ORNATURE

To trim away the shrapnel,
the surgeon sliced a sliver of her skull.
Now, when she lifts her hair
to show the shape, it’s moony:
a figure-eight has flown
the convex bone, therewith
some beauty to inscribe: 
blood forms rubies;
you eat the Host for food.
The beautiful girl says
she’ll always be a soldier.  
She’d had a two percent chance
of waking from the coma.
“Someone has to be that
two percent,” she says
with a smile. “Why not me?”
--And, sackcloth or silk,
the husk did open.  We decorate
her friends at the end of May.


                          -Christina Pugh
                          Southwest Review

 

                                                                                                                          
SEEING IN                                                                                                                                           

I’m grateful for the way my eye travels--
or skirts, looping over canvas, hillsides smooth
and spackled as walls; I’m grateful for the farmhouse
troweled on green foundations, its replica
half-vanished in the grass, my eye cutting spirals

on the surface:  school figures, early morning ice;
I’m grateful that oils compound and shimmer
in museum light, but only when I lean in closer
and rest my eye mothlike on a slip of blue burning
under brown, accreted like bow strokes

trellising a fugue, or andante moving 
with the urgency of paradox; I’m grateful for unrest
under colors, for all I need to rove
to see, for fields of vision populous as fields.

                                            -Christina Pugh
                                            Poetry Northwest

			AMOROUS FRIENDSHIP	Index

Well, hasn't it been one long, "monstrous,
returned, but unrequited love affair,"
as I predicted once, in the words of Yeats,
yearning for spring, with winter in the air?
No, not an affair, and unrequited? Hell,
hardly dreamt of, really. Call it friendship
and forget the amore--this, as I recall,
was your advice. Sound, but I defended
my choice of words. Affair here represented
not sex, but desire--mine--and hurt in the heart
perceiving, again and again, something as ended,
whereas friends need have no fear in being apart
and do not phone for weeks and yet stay calm,
undisturbed by music that's not on.

-Belle Randall
Poetry 

			BEFORE I HAD A NAME	Index

The first voices to reach my ears-- still bloodwet, crumpled,
half-clogged in birth-grease as my head rocked in the harbor of thighs,
eyes slits in the shock of first light, arms

pinned flipper-like writhing

among slick walls too constricted for even the first scald of air--,
the first voices I heard after knowing
only the weather of blood-thrum,

the seasons of breathing,

the rush of core fluids gurgling like cavewater over stones,
were the voices debating my decapitation and dismemberment.

For I, though I was a 10-month baby, I was slow in coming,
huge blue galleon stalled between the shifting stones,
pelvic bones of my mother.
I was in trouble before I had a name, receiving instruction in how
no trouble is ever one's own, always is shared by another.
My mother lay helplessly glowing with sweat and exhaustion,
the great moonbelly contracting and squeezing for life, hers, mine,
as wise men conversed by a table set with the tools of our undoing.

So these were the voices, desperately hushed, deliberate,
and this my first brush with air, breath-taking, benumbing,
glove-pale hands outstretched, gaudy with the blood of my birth.
Masked faces glared, remote eyes hardening against me
among the low moans and sharp yips of my mother
as I, strangling, I, burning blue,
was trying to suck the great emptiness--
birth-whale beached in the heavy coat of being
caving in these lungs that wanted to
open expansive in the light
of this other world, this sphere before knowing,
where everything was luminous in robes of loose mist,
even the scalpels decisively angled in hands so close--,
when the great thrust came that shoved me clear
and I fell, delivered into their hands, at last.

-William Pitt Root
Rattapallax

The fairies are dancing all over the world
         In the dreams of the President
                   they are dancing
   although he dares not mention this at cabinet meetings
In the baby blood of the brandnew
       they are dancing O most rapturously
  and over the graves of the fathers and mothers
                  who are dead
and around the heads of the mothers and fathers who are not dead
         in celebration of the sons and daughters
               they've given the earth
The fairies are dancing in the paws and muzzles
         of dogs larking in the broad field next to the church
The fairies have always danced in the blood of the untamed
               in the muscular horned goat
             and the shining snake
     in the blood of Henry Thoreau
             and most certainly Emily Dickinson
And they skip in the blood of the marine recruit
       in his barracks at night
               his bones aching with fatigue and loneliness
        and pure dreams of women
                        and his goodbuddy in the next bunk
They are most lovely in the eyes of the black kid
          trucking in front of the jukebox
               at the local pizzeria
more timorous in the eyes of his white friend
        whose hips are a bit more calcified
with hereditary denunciation of the fairies
        May the fairies swivel his hips
On sap green evenings in early summer
             the fairies danced under the moon in country places
      danced among native american teepees
and hung in the rough hair of buffalos racing across the prairies
                and are dancing still
                      most hidden
                     and everywhere
in some, only in the eyes
        in others a reach of the arm
            a sudden yelp of joy
reveals their presence
The fairies are dancing from coast to coast
       all over deadmiddle America
               they're bumping and grinding on the Kremlin walls
          the tap of their feet is eroding all the walls
                   all over the world as they dance
In the way of the western world
             the fairies' dance has become small
       a bleating, crabbed jerkiness
but there for all that,
      a bit of healthy green in the dead wood
                 that spreads an invisible green fire
         around and around the globe
encircling it in its dance
          of intimacy with the  secret of all living things
The fairies are dancing even in the Pope's nose
              and in the heart of the most stubborn macho
      who will not and will not
                and the fairies will
                          most insistently
        because he will not
In the Pentagon the fairies are dancing
            under the scrambled egg hats
   of those who see no reason why youths should live to old age
The fairies bide their time and wait
      They dance in invisible circlets of joy
         around and around and over the planet
they are the green rings unseen by spaceships
      their breath is the earth of the first spring evening
They explode in the black buds of deadwood  winter
               Welcome them with open arms
      They are allies courting in the bloodstream
          welcome them and dance with them

                                                        - Michael Rumaker

In my aquarium the fish went round

and round—kissing fish and clown fish

and something else very blue with a mouth

grimmer than Grandfather’s, whom we could

offend without knowing.  Then no amount

of running next door to beg through the locked screen,

what did I do? would help.  No amount of

saying sorry, always stammering on the first

snakelike S sizzling into frayed rope.

 

No amount of whistling to our dog Ruff

would make him stay and not race across fields

as if running were breathing to him.

But we wanted to fondle and smooch,

to throw sticks and have him fetch them right back.

We chained him up because we loved him.

Grandfather must have felt this way about

whatever was inside his head he never let out,

his long list of reasons to be bitter,

 

that gene he fattened and passed on

to three generations, which probably was

passed on to him, locked midway in the chain,

since his own father caught an infection

from a horse and died just days after

conceiving him.  Plant matter to coal, coal

to diamond—things pressed down long enough

turn hard, then a grownup finds them precious

and snarls or hisses when you get close.

 

I really thought if I stood outside and stared

till I saw the exact moment the streetlight

came on, my dog would speak, my fish would

let me hold his golden fin-flutter to my lips,

and my own dead father would step out from

the vanishing point at the end of our street.

It was winter, so what I got was frostbite

and a weeping mother bathing my hands

in pans of cool water.  Still, I wonder,                                                   

   

what if we could reel through our memories

of childhood to the exact moment before

the salt went into the wound, that moment

of pure perception before the hardening began?

Leaning from her arms to hand an apple

to a horse’s brown teeth and velvet nose,

laughing at its warm breath—“Little Miracle”

my grandfather was then, child number ten,

birthed out of his mother’s long black clothes.

 

                                              -Betsy Sholl

                                       Crab Orchard Review

 

 

 

 

 

LULLABY IN BLUE

 

 

   Now the child takes her first journey

through the inner blue world of her mother’s body,

   blue veins, blue eyes, frail petal lids.

 

   Beyond that unborn brackish world so deep

it will be felt forever as longing, a dream

   of blue notes plucked from memory’s guitar,

 

   the wind blows indigo shadows under streetlights,

clouds crowd the moon and bear down on the limbs

   of a blue spruce.  The child’s head appears,

 

   midnight pond, weedy and glistening.

It draws back, reluctant to leave its first home.

   Blue catch in the back of the mother’s throat,

 

   ferocious bruise of a growl, and out slides

the iridescent body—fish-slippery

   in her father’s hands, plucked from water

 

   into such thin densities of air,

her arms and tiny hands stutter and flail,

   till he places her on her mother’s body,

 

   then cuts the smoky cord, releasing her

into this world, its cold harbor below

   where a blue caul of shrink-wrap covers

 

   each boat gestating on the winter shore.

Child, the world comes in twos, above and below,

   visible and unseen.  Inside your mother’s croon

 

   there’s the hum of an old man tapping his foot

on a porch floor, his instrument made from one

   string nailed to a wall, as if anything

 

   can be turned into song, always what is

and what is longed for.  Against the window

   the electric blue of cop lights signals

     

   somebody’s bad news, and a lone man walks

through the street, his guitar sealed in dark plush.

   Child, from this world now you will draw your breath

 

   and let out your moth flutter of blue sighs.

Now your mother will listen for each one,

   alert enough to hear snow starting to flake

 

   from the sky, bay water beginning to freeze.

Sleep now, little shadow, as your first world

   still flickers across your face, that other side

 

   where all was given and nothing desired.

Soon enough you’ll want milk, want faces, hands,

   heartbeats and voices singing in your ear.

 

   Soon the world will amaze you, and you

will give back its bird-warble, its dove call,

   singing that blue note which deepens the song,

 

   that longing for what no one can recall,

your small night cry roused from the wholeness

   you carry into this broken world.

                                                                                                 

                                                 -Betsy Sholl

                                       Green Mountains Review

 

 

NIGHT VISION

 

I thought city hall might be blown up, but not my street.

The bombs are smart, they can tell what’s residential,

can find a building at night after its workers have gone,

just papers left to fly out of steel cages, wheeling like gulls,

only silent, no rusty hinge, no old fan belt of a cry.

 

I thought the courthouse’s wood panels might be curled

by the heat, names of accused and accuser mingled in ash.

Maybe the police station, chunks of concrete collapsing

on the garage full of confiscated cars, thin plumes

of smoke rising through skeletal beams.

 

But not my street with its flower baskets,

its seven schools, two pizza shops, its butcher

selling gourmet food, its shoe repairs, its sewing shop

run by two Koreans.  I didn’t expect to see

lawns seared, porches charred, windows blown out,

 

our family portraits scattered on the street in pools

of water from the firefighters’ anxious dousing.

I didn’t expect people wailing, shaking their fists,

bent over limp children who’d been walking to school.

But I was wrong, wrong.  None of this happened,

 

not here on this street, not downtown.  None of it

occurred anywhere outside the green night lens

of my own troubled sleep’s lit-up synapses,

my foolish dream which couldn’t tell fear from truth,

could not distinguish between here  there  us  them.

 

                                                    -Betsy Sholl

                                              Chautauqua Review

			POE VOTES	Index

 

Wednesday Oct. 3rd, 1849

all liquored up

and dragged

(Crane guesses)

retching through Baltimore

polling place to polling place

to Ryan's 4th Ward,

each time a different

dead man, with

his semblance of a life,

and each time

under another name

this same sad man

dying those deaths

became

a whole gang of votes:

this sorry man

jingle man

this haunting

genius of American letters

                        -James Scully

                       Apollo Helmet

                     Curbstone Press

THERE IS NO TRUTH TO THE RUMOR

there is no truth to the rumor

the Constitution's

a goddamned piece of paper

it's not vegetable, but animal

dressed as parchment--

invented in Pergamon

in not yet Turkey

3rd century BCE

when the papyrus ran out

Ionian Greeks called sheets of it

diphtherai, or 'skins'

by the time of Herodotus

writing on skins was common

Assyrians and Babylonians

in what for now is called Iraq

were already writing on skins

writing and rewriting

past traces of earlier writing

on recycled skins

they'd scrubbed and scoured

they wrote what they believed

mattered

on something meant to last

rabbinic books weren't books

but scrolls of parchment, as

were, later, early Islamic texts

great civilizations as living cultures

writing themselves on skin

writing rewriting

laws, histories, religions, all

on cured skin: split

sheepskin, goatskin, cowhide,

horsehide, squirrel and rabbit

aborted calf fetuses

hairless through and through

as is the skin of angels

would be reserved

for especially precious stuff

yet regardless of grade, without exception,

skin being mostly collagen,

the water in ink or paint

would melt it slightly

creating a raised bed for the writing

like welts on a body

showing what's been done to it

even today, to write on parchment

or color it

the tiniest bit watery

is to bring all this doing up

each writing a rewriting

overwriting the life of skin

so if its breath is gone, its muscles

having lost all sense of purpose

bereft of heart and liver, still

in the heat and humidity

of human and meteorological exertion

it buckles, shifts, sweats and squirms

uplifting a little,

like from a death bed,

giving lie to the rumor

the Constitution is a piece of paper

damned or not

because, even dead, it will let us know

this was a living matter

that was being painted up, written off on

chewed by dogs and lied over

                                   --James Scully

                                          Logos

DONATELLO'S VERSION

                       1

is unexpected:

the boy David

shamelessly naked,

one adorable leg

cocked at the knee

nonchalant

vulnerable

soft-bodied

a true killer

he wears his helmet

like a bonnet,

its pointy peak

garlanded with laurel leaves

                       2

the kid's a winner

little penis

big sword

standing astride

the craggy winged

head of the giant, Goliath

                       3

Goliath's head is peaceful,

his death like any death

is restful, untroubled

by desire or regret

                       4

David's skin glistens, obscurely

under a patina of melancholy

what's wrong with him

he should be dancing up and down

with joy

                       5

poor David

the good guy

victory is the worst thing

that could befall him

                       6

in the glass of his great victory,

through the loathsome mist

of world weariness

he sees himself

becoming King David

                       7

sees strings of victory

twining into distance

with strings of defeat

how he will conquer

and flee

how puff himself up

to hide

how he will dance around the sociopathic Saul

how marry, sire, beget

betrayals, adulteries,

murders, torture

prisoners raked

through the brick kiln

a weakness for poetry

will have him writing psalms

again and again—

for all he has won

by this great victory

is his own disaster:

his family, his kingdom, his people

tearing apart and apart

                       8

he will go through life

eating flesh by the fistful

choking on shadows

                       9

in the improbable blood

of his great victory

he sees all this

and is famished

                           -James Scully

                   North Dakota Quarterly

			We both drink the water; neither can describe its taste	Index

 

 

                                                                              

From a deep well, pumped through polyvinyl and copper pipe, then out a faucet

 

 

Disrobing, you draw a bath, soap every round and crevice, lean back, cleared of forethought

 

 

From an earthwork catchment a half day’s walk from the aqal. Fill two bladders stitched of skins, pack them on the camel

 

 

After sex, the ritual cleansing—the dipper, the shallow bowl. Left hand wets a cloth and runs it over the rip in the stitched vagina

 

 

Gift of light, finger of wind and palm of gravity. In the song about water you are singing a song about water

 

 

The last infrastructure frontier for private investors

 

 

In the convoy escaping the city fifteen women came into labor at once. There was no water for the midwife to wash her hands. There was no water to wet the women’s lips. What can assuage the terrible thirst of the women? They left the ground beneath the galool tree covered with membrane and placenta

 

 

Discontinuities are likely. We will be well positioned to profit even more significantly when they occur

 

 

In the camp, there was no water to wash our clothes. The bandits entered. The shame of semen is ever in my nostrils

 

 

Water carried the house downstream. The flood was steel brown and thunderous. No one could stay away. It was like seeing blood coursing through the arteries of God

 

 

Sliding down the throat, cooling the tube of the esophagus. A small wave arriving in the stomach’s pool

 

 

Lee Sharkey

The Pinch

 

 

 

Earth come of lullaby of earth

 

 

Covered in ferns, the fertile sori dark against fronds

 

 

Punctuated by sisal and acacia. Long roots spread horizontal veins across the surface

 

 

Owned, unownable and whose to know

 

 

Young man, who are you shooting at?

 

 

The figure that moves across it, stipe and blade brushing her shins

 

 

Teeming with micropresence

 

 

Me? for there is no enemy in sight

 

 

Though Eloquence, you say, is a vice in women, I am no camel and I will speak

 

 

We labor to bring forth

 

 

Dig out the long, fist-thick galool root and plant both ends, the perfect arc between

 

 

This is the vault of her vessel

 

 

Home’s body, rubbing wool to flesh

 

 

Earth supplies everything that goes into it

 

 

Ribs of galool, sisal stripped, dried, pounded, shining women woven mats longer than bridal trains the house’s skin. A woman is valued by her mats

 

 

Skins are her trousseau. A woman is valued by the smoothness of her skins

 

 

The house a body, portable, a turtle shell and all that seethes within

 

 

Birth fluids should be spilled where blood has spilled, you say, trading our girls as wives

 

 

Though the breast that contains milk cannot, you say, contain intelligence, my lullaby will tell the truth

 

 

I have tasted the comfort of home again. Don’t drive me off on fear’s caravansary

 

 

The vulture has already circled my bones and the bones of my children, tucking its wings

 

 

White for anger, white for sorrow. We tied white bands around our heads

 

 

Lee Sharkey

A Darker, Sweeter String

 

 

 

Living as a wild thing

 

It is here, in the Republic of the Imagination, that we are most humane.

—Azar Nafisi, “The Stuff that Dreams Are Made Of”

 

 

Listening to Brahms, riding out on the strings, I realize that war has become the landscape of my imagination and ask, what if I withdraw that recognition

 

 

In the name of the raven—(c)rraugh—who occupies the sky

 

 

In the name of those who have passed into the thickness of thought, that we wear like a hood and mantle

 

 

In the name of the pine duff and the green stars that feed on our remains

 

 

It’s raining in Teheran. Crackety crack go the drops on the skylights. A student is lying in bed listening to rain’s language, thinking how, like a lover, it disinters the mind

 

 

In Teheran, when people wish to empty their hearts they turn to poetry

 

 

And swallows will lay eggs / in the hollows of my ink-stained hands

 

 

Come, come, whoever you are. / Wonderer, worshipper, lover of leaving

 

 

In love with a wild thing. In love with a face and the secrets it covers

 

 

A student plays Brahms through the crescendo/decrescendo of sirens

 

 

A bow waves like an épée over the belly of a cello

 

 

All winter, snow falls on Teheran, whitening the grey city, lightening the student’s steps

 

 

The violin bow is a strand of mercury drawn down ever so slowly until the last of it rests on the string. I hold my breath while the aftertone condenses to a silver bead

 

 

Lee Sharkey

A Darker, Sweeter String

			THAT NOBODY THING	Index

			JAMES McNEILL WHISTLER AT ST. IVES, 1883	Index

Whistler needs no one to sit for him now.
He is finished with portraits, with people.
Finished with nocturnes too, soft edges,
the muted light of a coastal fogscape.
He needs surprise. He wants to be outside
with a panel of wood, a thumb box of colors
and brushes, and nothing to hold him in place.
Bring on the war of sea and shore, clouds
blown apart. Autumn daylight like a shock 
to the heart stirs him to life. He is after
the spontaneity of a breaker turned back
on itself. What is a whitecap but a stroke
of wind on wave, the Lord's own breath
in a flash of foam? Away too long from storm, 
from the sea's surge, he feels himself awaken 
before the horizon's shifting form, where time
itself is visible to the naked eye, where a ship 
caught in a trough struggles to right itself. 

                                -Floyd Skloot
                               The Southern Review

			UNCLE GROSSMAN	Index

 

 

Uncle Grossman quotes the Greeks and the gods

and says the Great One knows when a feather

falls to a field, then he clears his throat

with the sound of a brake yanked into place.

Grossman, our childless nuncle, bumps

his avuncular head hard against the bird feeder.

As seed fills his fedoras rim, he says,

Pain makes a world that would not exist

except for pain.  On the way to dinner,

Uncle Grossman describes his current loves,

a woman with five bulldogs, and the nurse

who sneaks him endless xanax.

Life is comic, he says, and life is tragic.

Uncle G. orders his favorite dish, Veal P.,

but does not recommend it. 

Although our uncle has not been born again,

he booms with the strength of the just born

against white chocolate, the rosary,

and Galileos fate.  When a small nephew

asks us to drive faster, his uncle states,

No matter how many cars you pass,

you cannot pass the car ahead of you.

Its a rainy evening when we see him to the bus.

The long aisle of windows steams,

and we wave goodbye to Uncle Grossman

through the little circle of clarity

he keeps rubbing clean with the heel of his fist.

 

                                                          -John Skoyles

                                               The Atlantic Monthly

 

 

I DREAMT I WENT TO HELL WITH CHARLES SCHWAB  

 

He promised me a sail on his Swan

but off the bay

he steered wrong

and soon we faced a fork

swung by the Dark One.

Charles had the tender jowls

of a new senator,

no rent worries ever pitched

their tents there,

packed up, pitched again.

The greasy, dented cheeks of Satan

mirrored my own lumped

and pointy features, no symmetry.

He asked us to explain who had touched

our lives, moved us most, fathered

our fates, the friends who failed us.

Charles confessed first: he never

had a second thought, just pounced.

As for me, I had only second thoughts,

and therefore never...

For these crimes

we were condemned

to fathom each other through a kiss.

Charles understood me right away:

burnt coffee, aspirin, envy.

The rich man tasted familiar, like sucking

a penny, a miniature copper mine,

blood from a fish hook wound,

and the fish, and the hook, and the wound.

 

                                                     -John Skoyles  

                                                            Poetry

 

 

 

THE SITUATION 

 

Its tough, isnt it, star,

to be harangued

by every strain

of brimming heart?

 

Its hard, isnt it, moon,

when crowds fidget

with their swizzle sticks

as you brighten the bay?

 

And head, doesnt it hurt

when love ignites

its pesky orbit

and all logic strays?

 

Hot, isnt it, sun?

 

Admit its a relief, shade,

to wear camouflage

while the flamboyant

fade away.

 

Go ahead, god,

and blame this mess

of blood

and flesh on free will.

 

Thats life, isnt it, death,

when guardrails

along the steep drive home

bristle with wreaths and bouquets?

 

                           -John Skoyles

                      The Atlantic Monthly

			ONE FIREFLY	Index

He is waiting to be seen.
In this world I hardly matter.

What goes into the dark
to be seen? Nothing like me.

There is a festival of fireflies
in Muju-gun in August

where people pray for firefly prosperity,
in Korea, since the Japanese

exterminated their fireflies
experimenting with insecticides.

Firefly is a Japanese idea.
The one in my yard lives alone.

To be so solitary while signaling
for love, to be content knowing

the night has no real presences
except for the one who makes himself

their flickering mirror. Who ignites
and diminishes as they would.

How do we lose a lovely idea?
Desperate we don’t count.

Who wouldn’t prefer a fullness of fireflies
in their habitat? The males

flying while they flash for the females
who wait in the tall grass and flash back.

The fullness is one idea.
The idea must not matter

so that one firefly suffices for a thousand years.
The entomologists take us further.

They ask us to reflect
that the firefly is not a true fly. It is a beetle.

-Ron Slate

Triquarterly 121

 

			CLIMBING TAI SHAN	Index

Six thousand steps,
'every step an arrival.'

On the way up, I’m thinking
... what to say when I pass
through the South Gate
to Heaven, as soon I must?

History has it
I’m supposed to say
something unforgettable,
wise. Confucius,
for example, looking down,
said: 'The world is small.'

At the Temple of Azure Clouds,
an old Chinese woman
with bound feet and walking
stick--a peasant woman,
a supplicant--appears to me.
Is she my mother?

Shall I say,
having climbed the mountain,
'I have climbed the mountain,'
am there, and will live
one hundred years?

The Han Emperor Wu,
who, twenty-one hundred
years ago, rejected
every manuscript
his writers submitted,
has a monument too:
a wordless, blank stone--
on which I can write anything,
the Emperor being dead.

Silence is unforgettable, wise.

              --William Slaughter
                Poetry

			ARS POETICA	Index

A musket ball burrows through a body
Pulverizing every bone it's introduced to-
Later, bone-powder caking on a saw blade,
Arms in a heap, as though lolling,
A leg dropped into a large metal bucket.
"A horrible sound," he recalled years later.
"I had to listen to it so I could help them
Write their loved ones." Walt Whitman,
A sun umbrella going tent
To tent in the outdoor surgical wards-
Sitting with the mutilated, the soon
To be discharged, wild flowers all around
Cheering spring on.
Then coaxing the letters home.

-Arthur Smith
Sonora Review