[Book Reviews ]
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Click on the blue title to go to poem Charles Rafferty Robin E. Sampson Art Schwartz James Scruton Alexandrina Sergio Julia Meylor Simpson Geo. Staley Michael Steffen Meryl Stratford Peter Ulisse Mar Walker Philip Wexler Kelley White Laura Madeline Wiseman Cecilia Woloch Ulys H. Yates Jianqing Zheng & Angela Ball An Uncle Reduced to Ashes The Saints at My Church
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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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Charles Rafferty 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. + ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Robin E. Sampson 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2nd place - 2008 Connecticut River Review Contest; Judge Kim Bridgford 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 3rd Place - 2008 Wallace Winchell Poetry Contest; Judge Vivian Shipley 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Michael Steffen 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 1 st 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Meryl Stratford 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 2nd place – 2007 Brodine/Brodinsky Prize; Judge Steven Straight Hearts You work with the old. Every day meet loneliness 120 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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.” ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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 bejamins. When my imaginary cock is spotted at a party, a hush fills the room. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Cecilia Woloch 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? ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Ulys H. Yates 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 Zheng and 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 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Jianqing Zheng and Angela Ball 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 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ 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 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Frederick Zydek 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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