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Contents click on blue title to go to 25 Jean Copeland The Very Thought of You 26 Mark Clarq The Wreath at the Bridge at Cornell 27 Sean Thomas Dougherty Echolocations 29 Thomas Dukes A Horticulturalist’s Guide to Gay Marriage 30 Timothy Green Hip 31 John Grey Long Hand of Love 32 Gwen Gunn Swansong 33 Doris Henderson Cookie Cutters
The Very Thought of You Elvira Abate Franco 1896 – 1978
“Nonny died,” my mother whispered, replacing the receiver, trying to explain to an eight year-old her grandmother wasn’t coming for Sunday dinner anymore. I knew death. My cat
introduced me to the concept from the street a year earlier. But I didn’t know I’d seen the last of Nonny’s eyes squinting when she laughed, or would never again hear her say
close the light in broken English or tell me to put my stockings back on. I’d laugh and correct her – “Nonny, they’re socks, not stockings.” I didn’t know the night we snuggled
in my parents’ bed watching Lawrence Welk was the last moment alone we’d share. I didn’t know how I’d miss soft, old fingers rolling dollar bills and Hershey Kisses in my small hand –
an index finger over her lips and nose swore me to secrecy. And I didn’t know twenty-nine years later I’d write her a poem and my heart would crash like an eight year-old just learning
her grandmother wasn’t coming for Sunday dinner anymore.
Mark Clarcq The Wreath On The Bridge At Cornnell
Ignored by everyone Wilting in the cold Yellow roses brown about the edges.
The students give no pause defined, No focused, single look. Just a subtle hesitation, a slight avoidance.
Upon the air no scent of flowers, but distinct A tinge of fear, a whiff of sadness, The scent of questions not asked and unanswered.
The air is full of total loss, of nothing left to do. A thick and heavy emptiness pervades, and we Push through it, making swirls of silence,
Creating eddies of no answers, Mixing our questions to hide them all together, Or at least dilute them with all our other wonderings.
But no. Looking back at the wreath I see the weighted curtains of despair Still hang about the railing.
Sean Thomas Dougherty
Smokestack dusk dance, the swing shift from the metallurgy plant smoking on break in the dusk, near the empty laundry mat where I wash the dusk from my clothes, where the Polish women weave the last strands of dusk with their fingers, Fate fettered dusk, through the open doors of MacDougal’s when men drink their dusk on ice, raise em high in blue tinged light. The gloaming the Irish call it, the time between, when the ghost riders grieve the grail, when the open hearted hear the hymns of those hands that held the light and let it spill. My father at night, his glass of dusk, the work day dust in the palm of his hand. Pocket coins to turn out on the bureau before bed. So much sweetness in the dusk of open windows where Ms. Sanchez and her cousin Alma lean over the flower potted ledges, talking gossip. So much of what is sweet is elegy: Children eat the dusk in long tongues of letters scrawled in sidewalk chalk. Cats meow and hiss the dusk, mew the dusk as the lights of windows click on and the fireflies rise through the trees. I fold my clothes as if my hands are praying, praying for those people whom I love whom the dusk has long set on, for those I love whom the dusk is yet to come. In between houses a radio plays, a tender pop song calls out Maria Maria as the dryer spins. Men smoke in the near-dark outside the factory, now turning black blue, like a dusk colored bruise on Marty’s forearm where he dropped a piece of sheet metal. He blows his smoke, the gravity of dusk, at the 7 Eleven entering the Slurpee machine, on the sneakers of Marshall, who sits on the curb, sharpening a knife in the dusk, asking, Is this the last paycheck before my dying? Is this my probation before night?
Echolocation (for George)
Friday night drunk the quiet shimmer, bus drivers at the bar, not pawn-shopped or glass partitioned, always singing lament,
some form we have forgotten. Elegiac's tough despair. Falling into his own face, we watched. A little wind having touched through the open door.
In high summer when the bartender wore spangles and a pirate's hat. It must've been Thursday, two dollar Russian shots.
And then the witnessed kisses: Orchids on the wallpaper near the bathroom door. That sadness like shoveling dirt or coal.
An alphabet unfolded, new letters with each drink. Squinting as loud as I could, I leaned to hold your grief: Halloed chords,
haunted sentences of her face you held. Black jacketed ghosts on their final round, we ignored the bell. The jukebox blowing badness.
Ignored the uselessness of laying down fragments to reveal the whole. Turned away until too late. When she appeared as if the eye
had found her voice. Listened to the corners of her mouth, sucking a lime, she of the black bangs your face fell towards. 2:30 AM, the saloon
of language served the stumbling counterpoint of closing time. We stepped into the swaying street with the same belief that sends bats tumbling blindly through the beautiful dark.
Thomas Dukes
A Horticulturalist’s Guide to Gay Marriage in Ohio
My beloved has gone down to his garden, to the bed of spices Song of Solomon 6:2
In the black soil of my everyday complaint, Rich set three Carolina hydrangeas because Mama grew them with heads big as planets: the people who bought her house chopped up Eden before the bank foreclosed, and I lost Mama a second time.
Rich planted seven more magnolias to remind me of the white mercies Mama’s sisters brought to my many hospital beds and our kitchen, where hot coffee and pecan pie worked miracle healings.
Someone asked Will you two really make it? I can answer only in holy numbers hardy to northeast Ohio where our outlaw marriage grows even in Lent, one crocus at a time, as we answer the shepherd’s weathered call. Timothy Green Hip John Grey
When given over to the letter on my table, your presence refutes all shyness, indecision, dishonesty. The earth turns on its paper products after all. And a gentle handwriting beats touch any day. Look at the curl in the capital G. It's a spiral no eye could ever unbend. And the S is no snake, not this time. I can follow its curl as easily as feeling my heartbeat. And all the lower case letters do what they're supposed to do, decorate the beauty of their larger brethren like a floral border to a diary. I pity the ones who only receive type-written missives. Or, worse than that, email, the look of the words so generic, the cat could have typed it. Not even phone calls can equal this generosity of contact. No one talks in French script or Gothic. And the sound barely lingers beyond the final click. Even face to face meeting now have their detractors inside me. Yes it's cold, hot, wet, dry. But conversation tells more than it shows. So write me more letters please. I've become something of a handwriting expert. No need to even read between the lines. Not when the lines are saying it. Gwenn Gunn a painting by Bevi Bullwinkel
Something of snow as it comes and blows a calligraphic griffin a dragon in the air eerily emerging from the winter gray aggressive like the males who danced Swan Lake more fiercely than in feminine versions retaining grace yet also cold and raw In foreground silhouettes black curves quickly drawn a hieroglyphic scholar might see a bellicose cry hiss or snort of a swan or a gliding goodbye lost in the wind since Pliny as early as the first century studied swans and found their deaths are silent Still artists can’t resist thought of beauty in death be it in song in words or wrought in paint: mythical sound made visible
Doris Henderson When I was ten, Mama put me to work embroidering tiny flower petals on identical linen towels, weaving stacks of red and blue potholders, cutting dozens of pale white identical sugar cookies.
Mrs. Davis didn't bake identical cookies, never did anything the same way twice. Her living room was cluttered with colorful books and magazines, bunches of flowers picked from the wild overgrown bushes in her front yard.
Every morning the Davis cows walked slowly across Route 25. All the traffic stopped. In the evening they walked back. This had nothing to do with Mrs. Davis or the records she played -- of Tosca losing her beloved, of Violetta dying.
She was the only person in town, besides the minister, who'd been to college. Her walls were covered with pictures of famous authors, historical figures, prized horses, reproductions of famous paintings. The other women thought she was "peculiar."
Mrs. Davis would talk for hours about her life to anyone who'd listen. Mr. Davis was not a listener. He didn't talk very much, either. If I were a cow , said Mrs. Davis, I might get some attention. If I were Mrs. Davis, I thought, I'd sit up all night reading those books, listening to those records, and never cut another cookie.
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