Contents: click on blue title to go to the poem
David Radavich
Matins
Dean Rader
After Amichai: Love Poem in 5 Couplets + 1 Line
Charles Rafferty
Georgia #raff
On My Daughter’s Preschool Artwork
Annika Rosenvinge
I Have A Few Tricks For Keeping
Charles Sabukewicz
A Courtship
Robin E. Sampson
Twiddling Thumbs
Window Seat
Art Schwartz
Lola High Upon My Shoulders
James Scruton
Bird Stories
Alexandrina Sergio
Golden Wedding
Julia Meylor Simpson
Dear Laura Ingalls Wilder
Geo. Staley
Little Miss 1565
Michael Steffen
Life of the Weak-Willed
The Guy Who Followed the Beatles
Meryl Stratford
The Dead
When My Mother Died
Peter Ulisse
Hearts
Mar Walker
The Missing Dark Matter
Philip Wexler
For the Asking
Kelley White
Twenty-one
Laura Madeline Wiseman
My Imaginary Cock
Cecilia Woloch
Salt
Lucifer, Full Of Light
Ulys H. Yates
Detritus
Thief
Jianqing Zeng & Angela Ball
At the Crossroads
Tears and Moonlight
Frederick Zydek
An Uncle Reduced to Ashes
The Saints at My Church
David Radavich
Matins
Words crawl
into bed with me
and speak of you
even though
though you are not here
and the morning
shines alone
even then
one is grateful
for gods who appear
when summoned
or not
summoned
wordless
as the bedsheet
I lean against
a world raucous
in bomb-blasts, rapings,
another bankruptcy for greed
even then
words creep in
through the window
thinking of sun
shining equally in your face
Dean Rader
After Amichai: Love Poem in 5 Couplets + 1 Line
I want to know the word
For your back in the morning,
The word for the sound you make
When my tongue goes along your breast,
The word for my mouth
On yours.
The unknown language of bodies is vast.
Stacks of dictionaries around our bed
Are like the empty sheets
When you are away:
A symbol of what is missing.
Charles Rafferty
Georgia
Can I even say I’ve been there? I had
a fifteen-minute layover in Atlanta,
headed from one place full of desire
to another bereft of all. I remember the lights
of the city as we banked above it—
a vast and toppled Christmas tree
no one had bothered to right.
I chuffed through the wide hallways—
refusing to hold doors, demanding the path
to the place my ticket insisted that I be.
There was no time even for a drink
before I got in the line and left …
If I have been there, it’s the one state
whose soil I can’t imagine. It could consist
of glitter and watch cogs for all I know.
I have only the mulch of the airport
flowerpots. They dotted my route
through the artificial air of a place
that shunted me into the sky
like an artery slashed and miles away
from the nearest needle and thread.
On My Daughter’s Preschool Artwork
Once a week, while my daughter is sleeping
and her eighteen brushes are drying,
I gather her paintings and crumple them down
to little fists of paper. I have learned the hard way
about having to use opaque trash bags
or piling fresh garbage on top. And I know
all about removing the tape loops after sacking
the museum of our living room wall.
When she asks what has happened to her
painting, I say that it’s at the office, given
to envious friends, placed in an archival strongbox
in the vault of a bank downtown. With luck,
when she awakes, she will still have no idea
what’s happening on the news, and she will not
have heard the tug and crunch that bring
this house to order. Again the walls will be
something to fill. Again she will try to save
her world in a splash of paint laid on so thick
the paper has warped in the drying.
Annika Rosenvinge
I Have A Few Tricks For Keeping
things vivid and the world
outside its tough holster
and close to my fist
that don’t involve drugs or crushing
someone else to my else.
But they are certainly diagnosed sins.
Forgive me; you might think
I break this poem
by not relating details, but I find
I came here to find
that some things
only emerge in the poem,
& even the poem can turn
its face away.
What I can tell you is that
these days, I look at people
and assume them caves, sheltering
crimes like animals wintering hidden
and creeping on paths through
the constant reminding dark.
Then my heart opens for them
like a young, fresh moonflower,
those wayward plants
that spread their tender parts rebelliously
to the night, and ooze sticky perfume
almost desperate in its sweetness.
Like the mythic stranger’s
caramel-coated, eager palm,
I and the moonflower say:
Come with me. I’ll take you as you are.
We don’t prize this: the criminal’s
discolored gift,
body plucked in stark choice,
no retreat casing their limbs
like a bone scan
fissures and hollows a burning confession
or the labels and soft strings lacing
the laboratory skeleton.
There’s something to that. Something
in the flash of never again and what now
and oh, live while you can,
that grave raise of the lungs
while you can.
You learn to live.
Charles Sabukewicz
A Courtship
Emily in her dream chair is aroused by the sun
rubbing up against the clapboards of her house,
teasing the veil of moisture beneath their paint
just enough to lift some color off, working on
the little round hats of nails to draw them ever
so slowly out, even now working on her arms,
her breasts, finding a surprising warmth below
and who in the neighborhood would know about
this April transient, handsome roustabout leaning
against the alcove’s windowpanes, showing off
his magnetic gaze as if she’d die to be in his arms,
follow him down the road as he warms flowerbeds
and stirs up clouds of bees, finding it impossible
to keep up as he hurries past the cemetery, erasing
shadows as he goes, beckoning her to come, lie
down with him, take refuge in his hot white light.
Robin E. Sampson
Twiddling Thumbs
On the train I look across at my sister’s hands
clasped in her lap, thumbs twirling
‘round and ‘round each other
and see reflected a familiar mannerism.
I tend to twiddle when I sit and listen, to poetry
or music, a meditation of sorts. Why she does it
is a mystery to me and I want to mention
this commonality between us but I don’t.
She’s my big sister. Always older, wiser, thinner,
smarter, better. I was ten and she was twenty-one
when she bought a car, rented a furnished apartment,
moved out for good. Glad to be gone.
Years later she admits she felt guilty for leaving
my younger brother and me in that situation.
She just couldn’t stay she says in justification,
though until then I’d never resented her leaving.
We’ve lived different lives and now we find
ourselves together on this train, both long-married,
both mothers of grown children, both parentless,
both sitting and twiddling our thumbs.
Window Seat
From 16F she wills boarding passengers
don’t sit here - you don’t want to sit here
sees the cute guy, thinks to herself
he won’t sit here. But he stops at her row,
asks “are these seats free?” adds
with a grin “I don’t bite, just nibble.”
She wonders is he flirting? nobody
ever flirts with me
He’s fortyish, curly blonde hair, rumpled chamois
shirt, nicely faded jeans. From Long Island,
heading to Cleveland to visit his brother
who says there are storms, reports of tornados.
He laughs when the pilot predicts a bumpy ride,
makes jokes about silly in-flight catalog items
like indoor pet gates and faux marble sculptures.
They never will exchange names. She enjoys
his little asides, his humor, his smile.
Glimpses skin as he retrieves his bag
from the overhead compartment,
wishes it were a longer flight.
Art Schwartz
Lola High Upon My Shoulders
You sat high upon
my shoulders, not for long
but long enough to be a thing
that always will have been,
lingering and present,
something like a substance that
will spread in ways a lively
good idea will spread to people
in another place as yet far off,
and I, insisting you remember
When, your hands upon my face
I bounced you higher yet
and then you squealed like
laughter bouncing off a cliff
and echoing on waves of sound
into ravines and up again, and
spreading like preserves to
larger parts, to cities and their
suburbs and then everywhere,
and causing change in the atmosphere,
And then you said again and more,
and your old horse whose most important
knowledge is about a certain sound
or voice and having neither will
nor a desire nor defense cannot do
otherwise, I bounced you up again and
then again, in moments which are those
that even now are spreading, those
which always will have been, and high,
so high I know you will remember.
2nd place - 2008 Connecticut River Review Contest
Judge Kim Bridgford
James Scruton
Bird Stories
—for Cindy
Like those fishy tales about the ones
that got away, like second-hand accounts
of apparitions or strange lights
in the sky, we trade flights of fancy,
avian folklore, shaggy bird stories:
that owl in a house I rented once,
a blue jay’s diving at our cat for hours,
the robin’s nest in your flowerpot.
Now this: some feathered shadow whose beak
keeps chipping at your window, the marks there
sparkling when the sun hits, like scratches
from a youthful lover’s pebbles
dashed against the glass. Maybe, I said,
it’s a jilted one, a would-be lovebird
from your past, or a spirit hatched
from one of the myths you like to teach,
Philomena or some bird undone
by Orpheus as he strummed his last lament.
Somehow you know you won’t look back
on this and laugh, whatever happens next,
whatever story this will become
of omen, ghost, or curse,
of just the ordinary trying to break through.
Alexandrina Sergio
Golden Wedding
Not for me,
Getting dressed up, going to church,
Repeating wedding vows.
It’s way too late to be re-promising,
Re-telling what we’d each start doing
To make blissful the life of the other.
More likely we should vow to stop doing.
You could pledge to stop leaving pot covers unwashed,
Hoarding old concert programs,
Drinking more than one martini.
I might swear to forgo the equatorial thermostat,
The cheery lights in unused rooms,
The flourish of the late arrival.
What use to alter such things now?
Half-century old vows cannot capture
What has made these 50 years,
Nor can new ones deepen what has brought us to this point.
My promises give way to prayer,
Prayer that I will never awake
To a day without you in it.
Julia Meylor Simpson
Dear Laura Ingalls Wilder
Remember those dark nights you huddled near me
on the drafty linoleum landing under a yellow light bulb?
You whispered stories, while I turned page after page
to learn if Pa had found his way home through the blizzard.
We battled grasshoppers, prairie fires and scarlet fever
while Dad laughed along with Johnny Carson downstairs.
I gathered in your words like sun-dried sheets on the line,
followed your trail of black-eyed susans outside my door.
Years later, I walked DeSmet streets and Dakota prairie
where girls in bonnets and red calico pretended to be you.
I found myself on a rise above your cold desolate dugout,
leaning into the same wind that clawed your brown braids.
I followed a trickling gully past an uprooted cottonwood,
knowing you’d been here, buttoning up your innocence.
3rd Place- 2008 Wallace Winchell Poetry Contest
Judge Vivian Shipley
Geo. Staley
Little Miss 1565
Hartford, Conn. — A little girl known for 47 years only as “Little Miss 1565” after she died in a circus fire that also killed 167 others has finally been identified.
When you entered the Big Top
that humid July day in 1944
you had a name: Eleanor Cook
a mother and two brothers there.
You held her hand,
didn’t want to get lost.
You were eight and liked the Ring Master’s shiny black boots,
caught the glint off his silver whistle.
The elephants padded about,
babies close to their mothers.
The clowns made everyone laugh.
Until someone set a fire in the Big Top
someone else smelled smoke
others screamed “Fire!”
and the trample was on.
Under the Big Top that July 6th
you were trampled:
perhaps by the polite family seated behind you,
or the family from Boston to your right who had just laughed at the clowns
your mother: badly burned and
hospitalized for six months
(and mentally off forever)
one brother, six: trampled and
died the next day
other brother, Donald, nine: survived.
At the morgue you were numbered—1565
photographed, displayed,
to countless strangers for identification,
unsuccessfully,
and finally denied by your aunt,
even as Donald cried,
“It’s Eleanor. It’s her.”
You went into the coroner’s book as 1565
and into the newspapers as “Little Miss 1565.”
You had lost your mother’s hand
separated from your brothers
even the dead one
awkwardly rejected by the living
as if God had taken your name and memory
as well as your life
and let you wander for 47 years,
lost from your mother.
Until a diligent firefighter,
plagued by your black-and-white morgue photo
and the mystery of your unclaimed body
pieced together God’s scrambled puzzle—
what had once been your life
what should’ve been the memory of you—
and retrieved at least a part of you, Eleanor
from your wandering
from the number 1565.
Michael Steffen
Life of the Weak-Willed
You opt for a breakfast
you can harden your arteries in peace with—
bangers and eggs, a pint of Guinness—
because you find yourself craving
what you’ve always hated having to give up:
grease and a good beer buzz
as you work through your own version
of the “seven deadlies,”
lighting the cigar you pinched
last night from Smokin’ Joes. It’s all good—
this life of the weak-willed—
barrooms, ashtrays, quilted vinyl,
frank dishonesty with assorted women,
because
if you could live, brief as your life might be,
within the halls of excess, you’d be free
from the sleeve-tugging torment of awareness,
its nagging don’ts and do’s,
your inner voice homing in
words that secure your bondage, Do you know that
if you don’t stop, you’ll kill yourself?
Yes. Yes I do.
The Guy Who Followed the Beatles
I rode a hobby horse in 1964
while singing Slim Critchlow’s Good Bye, Old Paint.
Miss Diane’s momentum-less 1st grade recital
in Holy Name of Jesus’ cramped auditorium
was aimed at diversity. She had me following
Louie Merlino, Bobby Lund, David Abbatoy
and Jimmy Krieger lip-syncing
the Fab Four’s She Loves You, Yeh, Yeh, Yeh…
I know how Fred Kaps must have felt.
Performing after the Beatles’ debut
on The Ed Sullivan Show, he shook
a granule of salt into his palm,
then poured, with fake surprise,
an "endless" supply from fist to floor.
Cards, coins, color-changing silks—Fred,
in a spotless suit and white shirt,
pulling out all the stops.
Like a BB rolling down a four-lane highway,
I learned, all those years ago, the room still buzzing
over Miss Diane’s Mop Tops, how it felt to be small,
my face red, arms rising and falling
as I tugged my reins and pranced in place
for a hometown crowd that couldn’t have cared less.
Meryl Stratford
The Dead
They sit across from us
with enigmatic smiles,
refuse to answer our questions.
They have finished writing
the story of their lives.
They read their favorite parts
again, again...
As time passes,
the dead become
more dead.
It's clear,
they are not coming back.
They've left us
no forwarding address.
Autumn dismantles
the carnival that was summer.
The dead dance
in an ever-widening ring.
Above them, the Big Dipper
pours darkness,
more darkness,
into the tattered night.
When My Mother Died
I went home.
Her fragrance
drifted from drawers,
floated from closets.
I put her ring on my finger,
wrapped myself
in her scarf.
I packed
the silverware
she left me,
a ceramic rooster,
my father's paintings,
loaded a truck
with furniture
that's followed me
from childhood.
We called the Good Will,
sold her home but
not to strangers,
gave her mysteries
to friends.
We divided
the photographs.
I slept in her bed.
Her vases
perch on my bookshelves,
a hummingbird,
some daisies,
a blue violin.
One handful of ashes
I gave to the wind,
the other
I kept for myself.
Each morning I rise
in the body she made me.
I carry my keys
in her handbag.
I walk in the shoes
that she loved.
Peter Ulisse
Hearts
You work with the old.
Every day meet loneliness-
feeble bones and eyes
facing the night.
So when your husband
speaks of “family history,”
won’t stop eating beef,
won’t exercise
it angers, scares you.
I too know of history.
Heart history.
Grandpa and grandma bleeding theirs,
an uncle with bypass at thirty-six,
father with angina,
aunt slouching in a chair
with oxygen,
begging for death.
Better to think of children,
the way they sit for hours
fascinated by the familiar:
a beetle, a toy, pots and pans.
Better to feel
on this steamy, summer screenporch
the ecstasy of food and friends
pouring hearts like wine,
the breeze
easing up your skirt
like a lover.
2nd place – 2007 Brodine/Brodinsky Prize
Judge Steven Straight
Mar Walker
The Missing Dark Matter
Don't tell anyone, but the royal cartographers
omit an entire continent from the maps. I know
as I am a close acquaintance of the Emperor
the Emerpor of Snore.
He taught me the secret handshake
to give at the border. He lives
in Exlie -- that's two rooms down the hall.
But he can't see you now
he's wearing his special
suit, hands behind his back.
He's having an
audience with King Thorazine
of the Tranquil Isles.
So, come back tomorrow,
and if you bring a map
that shows the way out of here
I'll save you my apple sauce
from the lunch tray.
Don't eat the lumps though
that's where they hide like pills
before I spit them on floor.
The Emperor will see you now.
Philip Wexler
For the Asking
It’s that easy, they tell you.
Walk through the door, devil
may care smile, toss your hat
on the hook, state your case
as if the outcome didn’t matter,
catch the prize with one hand,
the flowers with the other,
give them a kiss and a wink,
exit with a flourish. In your wake,
fingers wiggling for a touch.
But what happens is you don’t
own a hat which, even if you did,
you’re sure would land in the soup
tureen, so you shuffle in all humble,
eyes lowered, hands clasped
in front of your chest, stuttering,
apologizing for the interruption
wondering if you mightn’t have
a moment of their time, and this
really gets the locals amused.
You whisper that you don’t mean
any harm. The bartender interrupts,
“What’s that you say, son?” and
a round of thigh slapping chuckles.
They trick you into thinking
your fly is open, then keep repeating
“Made you look, made you look.”
You charge out the swinging doors,
empty handed, ears ringing, flop face
first into a place where horses paused.
Kelley White
Twenty-one
--C.
He says each day’s a constant struggle for
survival. Always hostiles, I.E.Ds.--
scout a building on patrol, take it, move
in, fortify it, then it’s time to move
on. The first week on the ground explosives
blew up the building they were securing:
a dump truck, driven by insurgents, rigged.
He watched the scene over and over on
U-Tube from his hospital bed. Patched up
it was a matter of days before he
was back on patrol. A car bomb knocked one
of his fellow marines unconscious. He
began treating the wound, a grenade fell,
“I’m awake, but I haven’t awoken.”
Laura Madeline Wiseman
My Imaginary Cock
I lean against the wall with my imaginary cock. We stand in a speakeasy of lindy hoppers, a towny bar with one pool table and a jukebox of country, a funeral for a man who was very gay. My imaginary cock likes pissing contests, runs board meetings with efficient aggression, wields a fully loaded automatic. My imaginary cock instigates wars, shoots missiles, tortures personal assistants. An Italian suit is the only thing my imaginary cock wears. My imaginary cock drives an SUV, earns six figures, medicates with scotch. My imaginary cock votes, eats sushi, flies first class. My imaginary cock has its own fan club, a line of coffee mugs and tote bags. An ivy league building is named after my imaginary cock. My imaginary cock owns a villa, a three thousand square foot apartment in Chelsea, a time share in the Keys, and a corporate jet. My imaginary cock rests on a cushion of benjamins. When my imaginary cock is spotted at a party, a hush fills the room.
Cecilia Woloch
Salt
What you wanted from salt was salt.
What you wanted from each of the bones of my hand was touch like a river, smoke.
What you wanted from smoke was the holy body ghostly to the mind.
What you wanted from the body was a body that would not die.
What you wanted from fire was heat and light, but also char, the flare of sparks.
What you wanted I had to give but to make it small enough to crush.
What you wanted to crush was the quick hand, river, birds, the field in flames.
And then what you wanted was salt, a woman weeping at your back,
but you could not turn to look.
Lucifer, Full Of Light
“Every angel is terrible” — Rilke
And if I should pick out the good in you —
each shard of broken light, like glass
from the wreck of your beauty, and look at that —
or one golden afternoon when you hovered above me
in rapture, oh half god —
how would I bear to lift my hands,
how would I bear to close my eyes
and let you fall, and love be damned?
Ulys H. Yates
Detritus
In my grandfather’s parsonage there was a huge
leather-bound, ornate-lettered bible that lay
like a sleeping omen
on a lectern in his study. When visiting,
I would sometimes creep into the study
when no one was around, approach the bible
on tip-toe as though fearing to awaken it
and slowly open its pages to peek—
not at the words, few of which I understood—
but the pictures.
I remember one in particular of Moses
descending from Mt. Sinai, carrying
the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments. I
would gaze for long minutes at those swirling colors—
heart pounding. It wasn’t Moses or the tablets
which caught my attention, but
that awful cloud behind him, split by lightning. I knew
God was in that cloud, ominous
with a finality no prayer could assuage.
I harbored the image of that boiling cloud
through endless summer Sundays, sitting
in the front pew beside mother
in that now vanished white frame church
and listening to grandfather preach
of love and forgiveness. I vainly tried
to believe in his words and not
the picture.
Even after belief died
like a plant withered by neglect, the image
of the cloud and the lightning remained—
the residue of childhood shadows
reason never quite illumines.
Thief
It was just a bit of colored glass
in a nest of sequins shaped like petals
but I didn’t know that
when I snatched it from mother's jewel box
and ran with it from the house. The slamming
of the screen door behind me
sounded like a pursuing pistol shot and I fell,
skinning my knee
when I missed the bottom porch step.
I said it was a ruby when I gave the brooch
to the girl with bouncing yellow curls, who smiled
and refused to let me pin it
on her blouse. I kicked a stone
and said I just wanted her to have it.
In the days that followed, I feared mother
would asks me about the broach
but she didn’t. And I never confessed
this first rupture of what until then
had been a seamless trust
like summer and sunlight. Nor
did I ever mention the broach
to the girl with yellow curls
who became unapproachable,
like a goddess who had spurned
an offering.
Jianqing Zeng & Angela Ball
At the Crossroads
If I really loved you
I'll never forget.
Of course I have to
breeze along
saying it's fine today and
the wind is gentle.
I can smile tiredly under sunset
saying life is so simple
without any setbacks or griefs.
But if I really loved you once
I'll never forget.
At just this crossroads
the once-young you and I
waved greetings and goodbye.
- Xi Murong's poem translated from the Chinese
Tears and Moonlight
Never forgettable, the tears in your eyes
reflecting the moon among clouds.
Last night, rain.
It drizzled the bleak graves on the far hills,
a small patch of catalpas
shading your tomb in green.
This morning, a fine day.
Vines creep onto the bleak graves,
wild wind in the valley lightly strokes
the white-headed grass on your tomb.
At dusk,
who'll go and read those broken tombstones?
I've forgotten the position of your burial
only to remember I faced the setting sun
while crying. At random, I choose one
covered with the thickest grass
and put a bunch of hyacinths beside it.
I shouldn’t weep. Knowing
the one buried here may not be you,
why should I shed tears like just anyone?
Several hundred years have passed,
your dream hasn't woken, and I wish
reality would become an old fairy tale
and I’d be with you a hundred years more.
Let wild roses bloom on our bodies,
let robins nest in our hair,
let fallen leaves fill our hollows,
soon a century will pass like this.
But this is only a dream.
The shadow of remote hills
has swallowed you and my sad heart.
I should go back. Walking through the pine grove,
I see dim flashes of deer.
Nameless flowers are blooming
by the quiet trail,
why do they reflect
a tearful moon every night?
- Xi Murong's poem translated from the Chinese
Frederick Zydek
An Uncle Reduced to Ashes
He is in the sea, perhaps he has washed
up on the shore and is beneath the sand
I walk upon to reach the waves. I will
dig for clams today and wonder if bits
of his ash spent any time among them.
He has disappeared from the planet,
yet I can hear his voice echo through
the atoms and electrons in my mind.
I can see him fishing at Lake Kapowsin,
standing in the boat, casting his line
out near the lily pads where big bass
often hang out to catch dragonflies
seeking booty among the blossoms. He
will watch for his cork to bob, to dip
below the black waters of the lake to let
him know the fishing will go well today.
I see him adding split vine maple boughs
to the fire in the smokehouse where our
sausages are steaming to perfection.
I see him sitting on the old Spiketon
bridge, having a stubby of beer, smoking
a cigarette and talking with Dad about
the Betty Grable poster he has tacked
to the wall in his bedroom. He will
marry a girl just as pretty, and when
the day comes, his children will carry
his ashes to this ocean where I now walk
looking for clams, but lost in remembering
The Saints at My Church
I belong to the church of Saint Charles
Darwin, Saint Albert Einstein and Saints
Arius and Shelby Spong. We like saints
who aren’t afraid to reason together, who
are looking for truth - not dogma - possibility
and ways to make things better understood.
We like our saints to be fellow seekers,
people unafraid of ideas who are adamant
about not letting facts get tossed aside
because they don’t fit some well-established
error. Saint Troy Perry, pray for us. Saint
Andrew Harvey, pray for us. Saint Thomas
Shepherd, pray for us. Saint Matthew Fox,
pray for us as we join you in the sacred name
of the Spirit we were promised would lead us
into all truth and set us free to live in
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