Four poems ----- Katherine Grace Bond

Strive

Once you write that first word

You have already marred the perfection of the page.

You grab some easy metaphor –

The crooked lampshade,

The masks on the display shelf staring at the ceiling –

And you know that it is already pretense.

Today you stood in the grocery aisle with a poet,

Each of you clutching sacks of oranges.

He said his heart almost exploded

The day the muse played hard to get.

One night he ran his aging body up the thousand steps at Suzzallo Library,

The next he woke up five hours into sleep,

His heart banging in his rib cage like a trapped kestrel.

Five years shaved off his life by looking for the right phrase.

You had that same sensation

The night before you read your fear of death

To a panel of dispassionate politicians.

You recall the month you killed your ten-year novel,

How you knew that you were dying

After thirty hours comparing airfares

To luxury resorts in the Bahamas.

That death was a slow suffocation.

The poet says the journals are all pretense now,

Academics vying for the best Italian phrase,

Serving up their cynicism with just the right Chianti.

You weigh your oranges and confess

That you’re not smart enough to compete.

The truth is you are still afraid to die.

You and the poet stand besieged by

The insult of frozen pizzas,

Stacks of marshmallow chicks,

The celebrity who cried on Oprah.

To face the cynics, you’d both have to acknowledge

That words are all you have,

To say them is to risk annihilation;

To say them is to broadcast that a poet

Is but one small step from madness,

Worse, that he’s a fool,

Worse yet that he’s not a poet at all.

You have the sudden urge to grab the poet’s hand and bolt,

To pelt the shoppers with oranges and gum,

To flip the bird to the academics,

To run those thousand steps and hear, on the final flight,

The yawp of your barbaric feet.

Jack

The day I stumbled into the house you built,

it was a labyrinth—

Chinese boxes

or Russian dolls,

each growing smaller

until I disappear.

You can get lost in a house like that.

I wonder about the rat.

Did he starve

when there was no longer any malt?

I could never begin to clean a house like yours,

all lopsided,

falling in on itself.

It makes me angry.

You should hire

the third pig,

the one with the bricks;

he knows more

about solid things

than you.

As it is

you trap people in here—

all the stairs,

windows that go nowhere,

the locked back door.

Drones

The night you stole the hives,

We had gone out—

A thousand of us guys—

One last rollick on the town

Before sampling the delights of our virgin queen.

The girls had fed us ambrosia for days

As they gazed into our compound eyes

And exclaimed at the size of our mandibles.

The queen could hardly wait, they sighed,

Assuring us that every man would have his turn

At ecstasy.

That night, mustered just beyond the apiary,

We boasted how we’d dive like comets

Over her—each one of us was sure

He’d be the first and best to rock her world.

But flying home, a little drunk,

We found the bee house carted off,

The homestead vanished,

Our drowsy queen

An adolescent dream.

And now there’s not a wing

To prove we’ve not imagined our own race—

No buzz in rhododendrons, no

Dancing grace notes on the wind,

Not one sweet treasure left on earth.

Unless it’s true the night you

Spanned the globe and made off

With a million honeyed palaces

You found some best-forgotten mercy

And left a scent the drones could follow.

It’s said that a year’s walk from the horizon

Where lone and level sands stretch far away

A solitary storehouse thrums with bees.

And so we wander,

Stingerless and hungry

For the sight of her—

A thousand consorts, who sweep the barren land

And mourn the kings we might have been. 

The Fall

When publicly undressed

You must

Remain serene.

Do not notice

The breeze across your belly,

Tightness of shoulders,

Weight of your breasts.

Pretend

No one stands, head atilt,

Scrutinizing the curves of your body,

Crook of an elbow,

The intermittent catch of your throat.

Imagine you do not lean

Over a precipice.

Instead, be rain,

Shale, Snow,

Small tumble that shakes the mountain,

Behind your face

A clandestine smile.

You alone

Know your secret tipping point,

How to slide out of view,

Hidden in your skin.

Rockfall,

Facefall,

Voicefall,

Freefall.

Do not mistake

Serenity for safety,

You, who chose this starkness.

Danger attends revelation,

Like a brooding lady-in-waiting.

Danger

Has her own secrets.

Wait

For the one who will stare into your eyes.

Hold still and do not look away.

The earth tips under both of you.

Let it.

Fall

Like a flame,

Like a dying star,

And do not be afraid.

Five poems ---- Kevin Minh Allen

Backseat Business

When I told you I loved you, you nodded

as if I would just evaporate into large cities

I planned to move to and you’d return

to small houses you planned to sell.

Kissed while twisting in the backseat and laid

my hand on your nude stomach only to watch

you blend back into your mother’s thigh,

thickened with every slap of your hide.

In your family’s cramped living room, your father watched

me watching you and your brother on the sinking couch

singing loudly to Vietnamese karaoke with a voice

only my mother could have taken to her grave.

Walking Along Airport Way South, Seattle, WA

taciturn,

walking through, faces caught

in the hurdles and voids and No-Left-Turns

of this revolving city.

burrowing umbrellas

press into onyx-drenched skies,

precipitating the downfall of hems,

clinging to that last inch of ankle.

church bells peal woe

for a fallen soldier and

plaster their sagging tears

to reflections of children and dogs in windows.

           

thick, thorny blackberry branches

push pieces of sidewalk

into gutters swelling with bloated leaves

and the occasional sandy heirloom.

highways converge overhead

in a time-worn thimble-fingered stitch

that mainly mends air pockets,

but is re-used to attach sequined neon auras to night’s black cloak.

Our Rejoinder

if they were to ask us:

‘why then?’

‘what were you thinking?’

our answers would appear too shallow for their lofty ears.

lock our reasons in a box and keep them high on an attic shelf.

our time was our own for standing on the balcony

and letting crickets land on our fingers, playing fiddles in our palms.

if we were to turn and ask each other:

‘why us?’

‘why now?’

the vast hay field we lie in the middle of would answer,

‘foolishness is not the provenance of the young.’

incredulous, we release life’s little tantrums under the setting sun

and watch our devotion skip from one blade of grass to another.

Shit-Canned

It’s November, and with a lot of time on my hands, I stand in line at church and vote Libertarian, and then come home to make myself a fried baloney sandwich. Feel like calling my friend at his auto shop to check on the new front fender I ordered for my mom’s van. She slid into a snow bank at the mall trying to avoid a renegade shopping cart. Instead, I walk outside to the sidewalk, roll a couple of packed snowballs in my hands and throw them at passing snowmobilers. Hit one and missed the others. Sometimes they chase me down to the school and back, but this time they respect the truce. I walk back into my apartment and finish eating my sandwich.

Playroom

too many graves

prematurely dig themselves

out of bones that lie at rest

inside memories of a child

whose laughter fills the room like

sunlight you can never wash off

Five poems --- James Eret

The Thin Red Line

“There is only a thin red line between the sane and the mad.”

A crocodile, silently malevolent, slides slowly

and secretly into the tropical algae,

where the mosquitoes breed and inject malaria

from their blood-bloated syringes,

hovering and swarming in paradise.

“Why does nature vile with itself,

land contends with the sea? 

Is there an avenging power to nature,

not one power but two?”

Beware all the youthful innocence,

beware the mothers who send their healthy-born

into an imperfect world.

Yet they long for answers beyond the distant horizon line,

for they come with their dark tasks

to set this paradise afire with crimes

against their own natures.

Yet there is the endless discovery of beauty,

like the rainbow-colored parrots, tamed to the touch

mimicking their names, seeing the sweating uniforms,

thirsting from every pore in the deep kunai grass.

Hermit crabs tingle the friendly palms.

Tribal songs in their harmony

show no portents of the destructive history to fly

towards them from the near future.

Look what alien stares can lead to,

innocent heads swimming together in a paradise of crystal lagoon,

moving in a womb of time

and treading towards the light of death.

“Who are you who live in these many forms?

Your death encaptures all, all that is to be born.”

How are we to know the right path,

how to cast the dice of sanity, to remember

the splendor and the wide power of the sender,

the world’s mortality and wrath pass it on after our surrender,

the uncompromising figures

of the global Math?

“Your glory, mercy, peace, truth, you give calm,

a spirit’s understanding,

causes the contented heart.”

Always Finding the Moon

 (For my son, Dylan)

No matter how overcast the sky is,

My youngest son always finds the moon,

Pointing at it like he had just discovered it,

Full of youthful excitement, saying “It burns.”

 We drive past a field of dead sunflowers,

Slashing over the puddles and bumpy roads.

From a moving gray haze in the east, rising

Like a dream over the restless Lake Michigan waters,

A full moon appears, disappears, then appears,

My youngest son pointing his rigid finger

Into the eye of The Sea of Tranquility,

Before a lunar silence pulls a tidal blanket

Over once deep-remembered, magnetic night.

 Luna moth, in your sacred greenness not to be seen

By any mortals, fly at the light of the moon, you sporting

Your delicately ribbed lime green and veined wings,

Perfectly camouflaged–flitting through the dark forest

Like a phantom, like my youngest son’s unbridled imagination,

All our imaginations, when we choose to use them

For moonlit visions and Luna moths dance till dawn

 In the fullness of the moonlight.

 Death at the Kabul Marketplace

I awoke to the wails of the muezzin

From the minaret. On the mountains,

Layers of fog masked the fir forests.

I awoke to the calls from the horn of plenty,

Seeds planted in my memory.

Today’s sun shines on market day.

Forgetting the fire and fear of those slayers

Of my sleep, my sons and daughters,

I haggled for fruits and fares.

Arcing from the mountains came produce

No one bargained for, let loose

From the mists that always hide a truce.

I awoke, hearing  shrapnel burst and fly

Around me like a mad festival, the brooding

Mountain peaks silently soaking up

More of the feuding history of my blood.

I awoke and haggled for fruit and my life and lost.

Chisel

“Who will walk with me into this terrible and beautiful world?”

—Dorrianne Laux

Looking down from the rocky fortresses, the imposing parapets,

In the crystal Valletta Harbor, the dghajsas, the bum-boats we called them,

Moored together in families of primary colors,

Sun-saturated and joyful bobbing,

Laid-back lifestyle of Malta.

That eyeball staring at the sun too long,

Slashed with blood and veined

8-Ball hemorrhage.

The sailor, lone sentinel swiveled on the bar stool,

Knew we saw his eye but said nothing;

But so much anger burned in his eye.

Just how did you get that eye?

The White Mice, the Shore Patrol, did this to me.

At Mail Call I got a Dear John letter from my girlfriend.

He ascended the elevator from Hell

To the Garden of Hesperides,

Where the lovers strolled, hand in hand, made out,

Surrounded by the olive trees,

Those benevolent branches,

A quietus in King’s Cross,

The sounds in the distance

Of prayers and chanting Latin vespers.

So filled with good tidings he approached the precipice.

The idea was to finish his leap,

To die in Valletta, Malta,

Such an exotic and mysterious country.

The White Mice talked him down,

No ordinary drunk poised on the edge of the cliff,

His mistake to start cursing them back.

They did it with their night sticks,

While straightjacketed on a litter-

He told the White Mice to fuck themselves

And they thumped and thumped

Blunt trauma bloat his evil eye.

Blind Homer, strumming your sad lyre, sing those songs,

That smell of lemons and olive trees, sea- surge of distant lovers,

Never again to walk, hand in hand.

For the Closing of San Onofre Nuclear Plant

(For Taro Aizu)

Beyond the Pacific beaches

The blind rip tides try to shake

Off their bruises as it is always done. The building many called

"The Two Tits" nipples erected

In the cool sea air, will shut down.

Taro Aizu, haunted in Mt Fuji's triangular shadow, victories come

Less frequent as the world grinds

Off its axis by the man-made fission

Already, the detritus of Japan's tsunami

has drifted to our unclean shores.

Now ghost ships settle down in the lapping surf

Devoid of their captains. 

The two maimed nuclear reactors

Are joined by that vast Pacific

I once crossed, Japan to Hawaii,

When my ship tracked the Apollo 10

With a special radar dish.

So we are close now

In our laments.

San Onofre, silenced nuclear plant,

Some brave souls complain of your closing; lost jobs dog us now.

But Taro Aizu smiles in the wreckage. 

There, on contaminated Fukishima soil

He plants seedlings

Of cherry trees which might thrive,

Given a chance, given a chance.

Two Poems -- Mary Jo Balistreri

Boating on the Yerres

                        after Gustave Caillebotte

Men lift the sky

in a shower of veiled hues, wooden paddles

dipping deep in the liquid silk of the Yerres.

With rippled strokes, they guide their skiffs,

slip silently between rows of poplars.

            A woman watches from the sanatorium, sees

trees shimmy in the skimmed wakes.

The green sheen of reeds sweeps her mind clean

            of all but the light, the men and the charmeuse

skein of river becoming shadows in the sun-drunk air.

Closing her eyes, she drinks the breeze, the stillness

            of this country afternoon, the lap of water on hull

as soothing as a lullaby.

            Shifts of color, luminosity flicker behind her eyelids.

In the cradle of her boat, she is alive to each vibration,

            braided into the melody of river music.

Portrait of Tennessee Walking Horse

I study your large head, your mane silvered

with age. In your warm brown eyes, time

dissolves as I reach back beyond the accident,

and you become breath of sun-scorched hay,

nuzzle against my arm, lick of tongue on my hand.

You lip apple wedges from my palm, and I listen

to the chew and crunch. I meet your steady gaze

on my face like a small thank you between us.

Standing now before you, in silence,

the canter of hooves  across the vast and varied

terrain fills my body with animal energy, the power

you hold within, the gentleness it belies.

Your coat carries the arc and blur of summer,

the scent of clover wafts around you,

and I am returned to earthly abundance

re-learning all that was lost in the fall.   

Tanka --- Karma Tenzing Wangchuk

Untitled Tanka                        by Karma Tenzing Wangchuk

A soft rain

falls on your porch,

the door left open

to let the sound of it

join us for supper.

Not much Spring

in my step these days

except maybe

on the way to her place

and on the way back.

While she's away

I water her houseplants,

bring in her mail

(mostly bills, reminding me

I owe her everything).

She hugs me

so long and tenderly

I'm lost in her,

and for an anchor 

forced to plant a kiss.

Waiting for her

to get out of the shower,

envious

of every drop of water

touching her.

Sometimes the wind

will strip a branch bare

of flowers--

a thought that came just now,

knowing you're leaving soon.

A Facebook friend

tells me her favorite flower

is the dandelion--

I think she must be

a good person, don't you?

Sometimes

everything hinges

on a word--

poets and lovers 

know this.

Two Poems --- Julie A. Dickson

A Feather    [A Mirror Poem]            Julie A. Dickson  

On this, a day of perfect weather,

Against the pale blue sky - a feather

Streak of white as clouds pass by,

Appears as sketched from artist’s eye

After which the canvas clears

When in the noonday sky appears,

Imaginary shapes portray

A moving picture, vast array

As if to entertain and show

The world – a ceaseless, timeless flow

                  ~ ~ ~

The world – a ceaseless, timeless flow

As if to entertain and show

A moving picture, vast array

Imaginary shapes portray

When in the noonday sky appears,

After which the canvas clears

Appears as sketched from artist’s eye

Streak of white as clouds pass by,

Against the pale blue sky - a feather

On this, a day of perfect weather

Known by Many Names                  -- Julie A. Dickson

Gaia speaks as Mother Earth, whispers softly to her child

Child answers Isis, goddess of trees and forests wild

Pachamama swaddles babe and holds him to her breast

Babe at the vast hillside, snuggles Demeter’s ample chest

Nokomis feeds a bounty, daughter of the moon abides

Longs for Earth sustainable, Jord the mother, life provides

Danu nurtures fauna, she walks upon majestic plains

Call we must to Maka, Earth Mother known by many names

Anu hangs her head dismayed, a sadness wells up in her soul

Children cease to honor earth, wilderness since the times of old

Mother Nature, Goddess weeps a flood eternally

Feels the loss of nature, the Earth not what it’s meant to be

George Held -- Four Poems

Four Poems                                                                               George Held

Corrections

Nature gave us names for our flaws,

Like a harelip or buckteeth,

both of which can be corrected,

that is, made correct in the view

of the community at large.

But before surgical or dental

technique made such corrections

commonplace, the hare-lipped

and bucktoothed suffered.

My dad once dismissed my sister’s date

As “pigeon-breasted,” but we knew

Dad’s mulish behavior was a reflex.

He disparaged our mom as birdbrained

But he enjoyed the humor of Judy Canova

Despite her buckteeth and faux birdbrain

And he laughed at Lily Tomlin’s horse laugh.

He’d made a silent self-correction.

Speeding toward Oblivion

Another birthday

And the days speed us

Toward Oblivion.

The older we get,

The faster our expiration

Date zings toward us.

Hang on to the arm rest—

This bus is out of control

On the highway to Oblivion,

Pop. 20,000,000,000

And counting. Can’t keep

That dang sign up to date.

Wave goodbye to the gang

Who saw us off—off

The cliff to Oblivion.

Come Back, Shame

What’s the color of shame?

Envy is green, fear is white,

embarrassment red,

but shame?

Is shame colorless as spit,

translucent as quartz,

invisible as a glass pane?

Can the Too-Big-to-Fail feel

shame for any act

they initiate? Can they feel

shame more than a beet?

Still, when someone

shames himself,

we can smell it.

Inventory 

I watch my step on every step

as I descend the subway stairs

like old Hephaestus on his way

to the hearth, gone in the legs,

scull more scalp than hair,

once-cancerous ear sporting new lobe,

yet I still hear well enough

to tell bad poetry at readings;

my one sighted eye has a plastic lens,

corrected to 20-20,

my yellowed teeth still bite and chew,

though most are capped or filled;

my crooner’s voice is now a croak,

and my beard grizzled;

my lungs and heart still sound

and my weight steady, though

my lower back often aches,

though I stretch daily and hope it cooperates;

my cock still stirs, sex still thrills,

but once a week gives me my fill;

my hands unsteadied by an “essential”

tremor, my skin wears a hundred tags;

my legs, uh, the stiff legs that started me

on this journey: won’t they ever be

limber again? How they would drive

me to the hoop and propel me

down the court and let me leap

for a rebound, but “rebound”

is now a word from the past,

on which I will not dwell,

since each day brings promise

of some new nourishment

or ailment—which brings me to my feet:

may they bear me long as my legs can creep.