Category — Poetry

FOR THE ROSES

I think of her watching the

last rose petals on a

day like today, say deep

August, browning like

an old rubber doll

she might have left

in an attic in Canada.

I think of her pressing

skin against glass, a sense

of summertime falling,

that sense of fall

that  that Sylvia Plath

wrote of. Or maybe some

freeze frame of what

is going, moving on.

I see her pale arms,

sea mist velvet jeans

hugging hips that

never will not be boyish.

In the wind, gone

voices move close

to her cheek bones. In

this frame she could be in

a fancy 30′s gown. Some

thing is raw, some thing

is broken. It has to be

a full moon

etching black water.

She has to know that

from what is torn

and scarred, some

thing almost too

exquisitely beautiful

is already stirring,

some thing dark

as coal becoming

diamond, insistent,

dying to be born

About the poet:

Lyn Lifshin has written more than 125 books and edited 4 anthologies of women writers. Her poems have appeared in most poetry and literary magazines in the U.S.A, and her work has been included in virtually every major anthology of recent writing by women. You can read an interview with Lyn by Emily Vogel in Ragazine.CC archives by googling “lyn lifshin interview ragazine”.

Landslides in Slow Motion

My banshee

storms better than anyone

she gets up at dawn with her legs and plush abdomens

when I wake

The BBC is a pocket of rubies

in whose knowledge I reflect

against a dozen lives

the autonomous mind of a lemur

reaching nirvana

it was the start of a natural

catastrophe

one that is still unfolding

at an excruciatingly slow pace

I feel like a tree letting go of an embankment

our love is cleaved by a small crack

our house is sliding into the next century

one limb at a time

the complete poems of John Donne

and a swarm of bees

in my pseudopodia

we were dissolving into the intelligence of a single bee

we were learning how to use machines

building a simulated city from scratch

look how the people are erecting a statue

how they move in

when we give them electricity

and blue skies

Waltzing With You

I want to open the mouth God gave to you,

beautiful mutant. Can you see me in this dusk,

asking nothing of it? I feel sentimental. Feel like

Captain Janeway watching a planet implode.

When you sit down at your desk playing

your live-feed video game, you’re really

doing a waltz. And me, at my desk, I follow

your lead and smoke a cigarette over your shoulder.

Eventually you teach me how to walk on our floor

without upsetting Dave the lawyer

in apartment 3R who had has to get up early

and go to work. You teach me how to stuff peppers

with whatever we have in the cupboards.

And when I call out in my sleep at night,

you always call back to me. You always, I think,

tell me I’m dreaming. Or I dream you tell me

I’m dreaming, and I feel a little better.

[how is it that there aren’t enough chemicals]

how is it that there aren’t enough chemicals in certain

glands sending good messages or that I have to light

a verbena candle to will a calm list of scenes in my mind

I eat a sardine on a slice of sourdough perhaps the last

of my kind to do such a thing to eat softened bones

and blue skin with a glass of wine candle-lit waiting

for you to come home and take off your pants

I am prepared (I think) to forgive myself yet it does not

enter into routine − how is it that a message can be

sent by blood by stem or by leaf? I lift my feelers

to sense your distance like a television

and what of forgiveness? it sits in the pit at the epicenter

of a peach let’s call it passion the way I ruin

and ruin like a silk blouse let’s call it sentience

or rough wings opening on the back of a cockroach

cleaning our kitchen at night and years from now

let’s call it the way I evolved the way I was put together

this mouth toppled onto my chin these breasts

thrown together over the heart let’s call it something

with a good name that a person with the right wiring

would fathom like the way your body makes me want

only that which is free and given the way I go to it

willingly one pheromone at a time without thought

About the poet: 

Bianca Stone is the author of the chapbook “Someone Else’s Wedding Vows” from Argos Books, and has been published in Best American Poetry 2011, Conduit, and American Poetry Review. She is the co-founder and editor of Monk Books. Her next book, Antigonick, a new kind of comic book, and collaboration with Anne Carson, will be out in 2012 from New Directions. She lives in Brooklyn.

See also: http://whoisthatsupposedtobe.blogspot.com/, and poetrycomics.com.

Sean considers himself  a storyteller, critic, dabbling haiku poet and a photographer. Shooting with the Diana F+, a medium format film camera with a plastic lens. The manual focus camera has “cult” following dating back to the 60′s.

………………………………………………………………………………….

Sundialing

drifting off the map,
latitudinally lost…
sunset is your clock

………………………………………………………………………………….

The Poseur, the Poet

wanna-be bashos
will try to caption beauty
blowing zen moments

………………………………………………………………………………….

The Places You’ll Go…

journey long enough
and your life fades to a dream
dreamt by ten-year-olds

………………………………………………………………………………….

A Good Freestyle…

living life as if
she were one breath from drowning
she learned to swim well

………………………………………………………………………………….

Valued Stuff

rocks: the poor man’s gold
it all depends on the light
and your perspective

………………………………………………………………………………….

Made in the USA

he’d seen all the ads
re: the good life and he knew
he’d come out all right

………………………………………………………………………………….

In White Noise

the hush now past, gone,
not defeatist, just accepting,
he drifts through the din

………………………………………………………………………………….

Unanswered Letters to God

weighting dreams with time–
withstanding their whittling,
wondering, why me?

………………………………………………………………………………….
 

Like human beings, the Diana F+ is an unreliable machine. It will let you down half the time, blurring an image or misusing light among its more egregious flaws. But when the elements do come together the effect is magical and the resulting image can be uniquely special. I have composed haiku and senryu poems to companion my favorite images wrought from the Diana F+. Photography is a challenge to the ephemeral inevitability of life, a frozen millisecond framed in a certain tableau by a certain machine. Similarly, haiku poetry celebrates the impermanence of things, designing a poem out of the transitory nature of being. It’s been an ongoing pleasure of mine to pair these art forms together so that an altogether novel experience is rendered and perhaps, out of the chaos of modern life, some basic truth about existence may be empathetically enjoyed by strangers.

-Sean 

Sean Lotman is a native of Los Angeles. He lived in Tokyo for eight years and has recently relocated to Kyoto, Japan. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in LPV Magazine and Grey Sparrow, among others.

His ongoing photo-haiku project can be viewed at http://idohaikuyou.blogspot.com/ and his photography site is http://seanlotman.com.

FAIR HARBOR

So August rolls in, the summer’s half gone.

Grit firmly embedded between my toes,

In old t-shirt and ragged cargos,

My flip flops clip-clopping on the boardwalk,

I see a vision in the dunes:

My childhood self, an elf with pail and shovel

Digging to China, about halfway there,

And I realize my life is half over.

For a moment I think it must be the heat:

Too much time in the sun, too much sand from the beach,

Too much barbecued meat, too much salt in the air.

Too much living the life. Then I think: who cares?

Because August’s still summer, even half over,

The surf is still running, the babes are still sunning,

My tan is still glowing, my biceps still showing

My life will go on forever.

About the poet:

Esta Fischer’s poetry has been published in New York Quarterly, Caper Literary Journal, PANK, The Blotter, and other journals.  

2011, THE YEAR OF THE METAL RABBIT

       for Roger Frank (1944-1972) and the Valenzuela brothers

The forty-third anniversary of the TET Offensive

and we are still burying evidence

trip-wired by an enemy we cannot see.

Is it change that breaks its frozen toes

on morning’s door sill?   I want to see

what a metal rabbit looks like, furred Humvee rattling

a Kabul street or the hare of hunger

uprooting rusty mortar casings

in a valley west of Da Nang, where my first

husband was ambushed by dragon fate, his stomach unstitched

by machine-guns, a quick bayonet stab.

Two days he dreamed between

steaming earth and death’s scabbed hands

swirling a bamboo stream he couldn’t reach

before Medevac found him.

He survived only three years, his Purple Heart

unable to airlift him out of terror

that strafed his constant fever to death.

In D.C. we meet two Viet Nam vets,

the Valenzuela brothers, Mexican Americans

about to be deported because they can’t prove

which side of the border they were born on.

One of them wears the Bronze Star

for valor on his decorated chest.

Spider-white scars from Agent Orange devour his hands.

He says he has no strength in them, cannot

hold up the flag much longer, asks the gunmetal sky,

Where is my Commander In Chief?

We leave the aging vets in dress uniform,

at attention in ice rain and begging justice

from the sparse audience on the Capitol steps

while Chinese exchange students snap souvenir photos.

What changeswill the Metal Rabbit bring

clanking in on its armored back legs—

such tough prey, invincible to hawk talon

and Kalashnikovs—

its multi-colored back

snagged on the hooks of the inhumane, ears cocked

for a compassionate mate.

COMPASSIONATE HEART

    for Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the eighteen victims of

    the January 8, 2011 shooting in Tucson, Arizona

Dawn’s iced bullets crack to split

night’s beautiful skull, the morning after desert wings

turned to lead and blood stained the sky

warming the Safeway parking lot, where

we shop for cheap food and where time

was blown off its feet when the congresswoman

stopped to chat with people, her style to listen

to people not distanced by emails or texts.    Desert was opening

her warm arms to the small crowd as

the shooter strode, pulled out the new handgun

and shot Gabrielle pointblank.  There is no other way

to say this.   The bullet tore its acetyline blue path

through her brain, then through more as he spun

clenching the terrible automatic trigger of his anger, gunfire

like steel hail popping on the tin roof of hate, ripping

into eighteen others who could not get away.   Among the six dead,

a federal judge stopping by after Saturday mass

to see his friend instead of hurrying home to vacuum floors

and a nine year old girl just elected to student council

who’d wanted to see how government works.    And she did,

at least, see how the opposition takes aim, crosshairs of rage

centered on their opponents vulnerable temples.

This is the USA, where the killer bees of intimidation

shatter the everyday compassion of even saints

like this congresswoman who wanted health care

for the poor, wanted an end to racism’s frigid fists, wanted

to talk to her constituents without rancor’s blades

slicing from a microphone’s indifferent bulb.

Now, Gabrielle’s chest rises

and falls to monitor beeps in the same ICU, where my sister recovered

from a massive head bleed, six weeks locked in a coma

five years ago.  I know how it goes—the shunt

pumping fluid geranium pink  from the brain

to relieve relentless pressure, the long weeks’

fight to keep swelling down, more surgeries and tubes, infected

dreams burning down dim alleys of pain and fear.

What do we hear?  Internet threats and billboards paid for by

political campaigns turned to ice, calling for M16s

to take out the opposition, targeting this slim woman, a moderate

whose slogan is love straight from her bleeding

and compassionate heart.

About the poet: 

Pamela Uschuk is the author of five books of poems, the award-winning FINDING PEACHES IN THE DESERT, ONE LEGGED DANCER, SCATTERED RISKS, WITHOUT THE COMFORT OF STARS: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS (2007 Sampark Press, New Delhi and London), and, her latest, CRAZY LOVE (Wings Press), winner of a 2010 American Book Award.  In 2012, Wings will release her new collection, WILD IN THE PLAZA OF MEMORY. Uschuk is Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Fort Lewis College, where she also directs the Southwest Writers Institute. Editor-In-Chief of the literary magazine, CUTTHROAT, A JOURNAL OF THE ARTS.  In 2011, Uschuk is the Hodges Visiting Writer at University of Tennesse, Knoxville.

Pig Roast

She likes his stories, the ones

in which she never appears —

events that happened before they met.

Some of them she’s learned

by heart, but now and then

he relates one she hasn’t heard yet.

Last night, he recalled an episode

involving two fellow students —

college days — who thought a pig roast

would make a great party

(fire pit, spit, cracklins and beer)

but couldn’t afford the cost.

They knew he had a pickup truck,

asked him to meet them late

one evening at a neighboring farm

and when he showed, he found

they’d shot a hog, too heavy to lift,

and the roast had lost some of its charm

and they needed him to help haul

350 pounds of pilfered, bloody ham

to their apartment. He shook his head.

The waste, he was thinking, some

farmer’s good sow. Poor man, poor pig.

“You guys are assholes,” he said

and drove his still-clean truck away.

“I didn’t exactly turn them in,”

his story ends, “but stopped to chat

with a local cop. Suggested there

might be something to investigate.”

Years later, she loves him for that.

Acedia

It is what looked up at you

from the eyes of the wounded doe

What the clock said to itself

when the mainspring gave way

It is the last few shudders

your father’s body finally made

when his heart wrote hopeless

on the hospital bed

and the long sigh of a black dog

and the dry skin of your beloved

who could make no more tears

It is the dead nut

It is all the days I tell you I can’t

but you are right:

It is desire

It is still desire

Remind me that it is desire

Alecto of the Playground

Fist, cry. Pushing the other
children down, fury of the play yard —
she spun and whirled, tirade
of naughty words, invective hurled
at handball rules and kick-the-can.
She stamped and shrieked,
pounded the boy who
won her marbles, tore at and bent
the chain-link fence, turned girls’
jump-rope songs into rhyming slander
until the playground monitor
called the teacher
who saw a small volcanic 7-year-old
with a smeared face and unrepentant
tears, steered her to the schoolhouse door
with the child fuming and kicking,
One more fruitless
visit to the principal’s office,
another useless
call home, seldom answered, mother
passed out face-down on the sofa,
dog sulking on its towel and
awaiting the girl of constant anger
to return and offer succor.

[Alecto, the Fury of constant anger, is also the protector of dogs
and the helpless.]

About the poet:

Ann E. Michael’s latest collection of poems is “The Capable Heart” (FootHills Publishing). She is a poet, educator, essayist and librettist, currently collaborating on an opera with composer Alla Borzova. She lives in eastern PA. Her website is www.annemichael.com.

Energy for Sale

You have so much inertia,
father said, my first thought

would be to save some – don’t
waste all of it on yourself –

then find a way to bottle it,
and finally sell it. But then

I realized, who would want it?
Only a lazy person – and he

wouldn’t be around but hiding
in his room, like you. Now, if

you had enough energy left over
to sell, that would be a different story =

people would knock on your door
to buy it wholesale. You could

charge whatever you wanted.
And I bet I couldn’t walk down

this street without someone asking,
“Where could I buy a little energy?”

“From my son,” I’d proudly answer.
“But don’t buy all of it. He needs some

in reserve to battle his old case of inertia.”

The Snake’s Neck Is for Holding

It’s easy to immobilize
a snake, father said – just

grab it by the neck
and hold on for dear life.

Just because a snake doesn’t
have a distinguishable face,

like you and me, doesn’t
mean it doesn’t have a neck.

If a glass of wine has a neck –
wouldn’t a snake have one?

Let me put it another way –
if it has a mouth, it should

contain a neck. The hard part
is differentiating one end

of the snake from the other.
Don’t grab the tail, because

The snake is flexible enough
to whip around and bite you. It

ingests from one end – eliminates
from the other. If you’re

still confused about which end
is which, then poke the snake

away with a stick. It may not have
as  dramatic a presentation for

a woman – she won’t be quite
as impressed – but it will do.

About the poet:

Hal Sirowitz has had poems published in Ragazine. He’s the author of four books of poetry, with a fifth one forthcoming from Backwaters Press in Nebraska.

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thePHOTOGRAPHYspot

Perspective of One Tree

©2011 chuckhauptphoto

Off the coast of Maine, there is a series of three small islands simply called Brothers, with only one tree among them. That tree, a spruce, never seems to get any bigger, I assume due to the weather conditions. It has been photographed and painted by artists for decades. Every year, upon returning to the coast, I scan the horizon to hopefully find that the tree survived another year.

Chuck Haupt is photo editor of Ragazine. You can visit his blog at www.chuckhaupt.com/blog.

For thePHOTOGRAPHYspot submissions, please see guidelines at ragazine.cc/submissions/

Oberly Road

A white hill rose south of Snyder Road
like a small moon, one spindly tree on top.
The single large leaf left in its crown,
a rough-legged hawk descended from
Arctic tundra to winter on ample mice
and voles in the Alpha Grasslands.

***

Among a host of Savannah Sparrows,
a Snow Bunting pecked seed in the street.
I stopped, quietly focused, then vanished
between feather and wing.

***

Blanched, brittle corn stalks pierced
the snow. Quick-stepping in and out
of their broken maze, black-masked
Horned Larks tweaked dried kernels
from rusty cobs with stout beaks.
The exaltation bustled bare pock to pock,
spooked, surfed the frigid air singing,
su-weet, sweet, sweet, su-weet.

***

I remember when nothing was protected.
Farmer’d come running from his house,
chase cars halfway down the street
cursing birders cruising his roadside fields
for hawks and owls, larks, longspurs, and buntings.

Now the setting sun glares at the grasslands
from tall windows to the east,
and a bulldozer perched on the western ridge
like a hawk eyes the farmlands
as if the acres themselves are plump mice.

Oberly Road 2

***

From his pickup truck, the farmer waved to me,
idling roadside with my binoculars,
as he passed by the small plot of preserved space.
I may have been just another birder
or he might have recognized my face
or the same red Corolla over the years
has become part of the winter landscape to him,
a cardinal bigger than a cow. I bet he’d laugh at that.
I bet we weep about some of the same things.

***

Sweeping snowy corn rows
like bronze blades on a shaft of wind,
the harrier’s feathered scythe
severed the last of the light.

***

It is almost too late to believe
that early in the twenty-first century
I witnessed fifty wild turkeys
flap, rustle, and clunk weary wings
against the frozen limbs
of a stand of quaking aspens along a creek.

They jockeyed for position
to safely roost a windy night in New Jersey,
their dark metronomes
keeping sleep.

***

That evening
the world was dreaming of snow
and sealed in a sheet of ice
polished with moonlight so sturdy
an old man could walk on it
like a child again.

Dreaming in Pompeii

He was dreaming of her in Pompeii,
his head, a stony egg,
nestled in her lap,
the porous pumice of her hand
at rest on the grey ash of his face.

Time cooled lava into solidified foam.

Their bones, a petrified city.
Two hearts’ ruins entombed.
The entire civilization of their love
buried for centuries
beneath the sleep of stone.
Her hand at rest on his face.

His head, nestled in her lap,
unearthed, but not awakened,
oblivious to whatever
archeologists or tourists—
not to mention poets—
might make of them
or of her hand
at rest on his face,
the way a bird settles on its egg,
waiting for him to awaken
and fly with her
far from the petrified ruins
of Pompeii.

I Didn’t Go

for Catherine

I didn’t go to Italy,
not a foot inside the big boot,
didn’t tour the pagan capital
or the home of the stone
made man,
nor the city made stone
and buried in ash, either,
or the city sinking
into the sea.

I roamed this rim
of the ocean,
stayed close
to my source.

I am a river
that would be a spring,
a droplet
of underground rain.

But my love
is a fountain
of wind.

About the poet:
John Smith lives with his family on the Delaware River in Frenchtown, NJ. His first chapbook, Even That Indigo, will be released this fall.

from Love Songs & Confessions (Love Song #2)

For the Sake of Want

“Do you ever have cravings?” she said.

“No.” I said, not thinking that craving meant desire.

I always wanted to be able to invite

a few fashionable rakes to a party.

I want to create experiences,

have parties, hire rancheros.

I won’t mention the children who were

boisterously uncontrollable; at one time

the rampageous blonde in the single

family home was “I.”

I don’t want to give you an anecdote.

I’m worried that everyday will be

like today and that I will never

have anything to say to you.

Time Management

What did I not do?

Where am I?

Where was I instead of where

I had planned to be?

There were ten places I could

have been which were slowly

passing me by.

But I am here at home

with the baby and the TV,

news in the background.

I call my mother and my mother-in-law.

I call my aunt who is tired.

These women say things like

“Make a list of ten things

you could do today

and check them off

as you do them.”

…”and then you can feel a

sense of accomplishment

as you do them, like

#1 dusting the bureau.”

Who wouldn’t rather dust a bureau

than drive 25 miles to a

room full of strangers at the

hottest part of the day.”

The trouble is that it

is good for me to be

there and it is also good

for me to be here.

Manners and Customs

Sewing is urgent somewhere

especially to someone from China.

Some mothers were or are superstitious.

Mine never was of has been (that I know of.)

But it is interesting to learn about

someone who was.

I’m more worried about the

pipes and plumbing in our house

than whether or not the moon

is shining on my loved ones.

‘Whiskey’ and ‘whiskers’

are only one letter apart,

or on a good day two.

I wonder if moonshine

has anything to do with

being kissed.

The tall man after he had drunk

some whiskey met the girl who

had to lean up to kiss him.

For her, it was very much

like a fairy tale.

She was breathless.

For him, it was less exciting.

Perhaps she had bad breath.

It was hard to decipher their ages,

though they were not so very young

“nor so very old neither…”

Words of Encouragement to Self

I think…

how could I improve my appearance today?

Maybe I should go to the salon;

maybe I should get a perm…

I’ll write.

Then at least I did something

I wanted to do as opposed

to something I didn’t want to do.

Why should one do things that don’t

make sense?

I’m tired of doing things that

don’t make sense—sometimes; on the

other hand, we don’t always

or even ever understand

everything.

That is completely rational.

I “shall” try to read these sketches

of others thoughts without

judgmental responses…I will try

to floss my teeth neatly

and come up with gentle

little phrases, quick and neat

like a clean countertop.

Everyone has a routine…”you

have to have a routine,” she says.

I mean she doesn’t buy it—that

a person could be completely routine-less.

About the poet:

Laura Close was born in and lives in Northern Virginia.   She received an MFA and MA from George Mason University and a Bachelor’s degree from Johns Hopkins and has been published in Jerry Jazz Musician.

©Jéanpaul Ferro

6:00 a.m. Miami, Florida

…………………………………………………………………………

Ravensbrück Clothes

Within the Greek Revival columns
of the Providence Athenaeum,
under the brick reds of the Rare Book room,
I began to hallucinate in front of the books
of wars and wars and wars;

I dream backwards to German soldiers
picking through all these brand new Ravensbrück
clothes, like ghosts perched up without bodies,
shirt, skirt, dress, these ghostly empty coats floating
through blue air,

picking up watches from piles of watches,
combing through wedding rings in pile after pile
of wedding rings,

over there a pile of bracelets,

things belonging to the Jewish blond girls
of Magdeburg, Koblenz, Hamburg;

sometimes you can still hear all those soldiers
echoes:

oh, it feels better to take the things of the most
pretty ones, feels best to kill them the slowest—

young, fresh-faced, faces minted anew like
bags of bank coins, this kind of beautiful face
that stares out into forever,

the watchmen slowly letting them burn
into this warmth for their hands, their young
cosmic bodies floating up right out into the furnace
of the wintry sun.

…………………………………………………………………………

©Jéanpaul Ferro

Island of Murano, Venice; Murano Vase

…………………………………………………………………………

The Nine Billion Names For One God

If a man understands a poem,
he shall have troubles.

—Mark Strand

She enters my head like ten quarter stars, all through
my corporal body, downward, a liquid warm, soothing,
wet like ancient amber, all these sinuous roots bursting
forth from my heart, spinning ‘round, a glowing Ferris
wheel at night, joyful as fireworks, shooting up like
coastal redwoods, Hyperion, Helios, and Icarus;

something I could have never dreamt before,
but now I know it’s true.

…………………………………………………………………………

©Jéanpaul Ferro

Twilight rooftop, The Elms Mansion; Newport, Rhode Island

…………………………………………………………………………

After a Day of Skiing at Loon Mountain

Your drunken muscles are Paris after all night, tight
after twenty-six runs down Upper Rumrunner and
Seven Brothers.

Face hot, sweat in the small of your back, ears ringing
and half clogged, you wonder why you do this to yourself,

the steam from the shower feeling like little liquid bites,
the rushing water hitting your stomach all buckshot and
time-worn,

later on, the food at the Italian restaurant tastes like it
came straight out of Liguria, the look, smell, and taste of the
wine leaving you translating Akhmatova all night,

outside, each twinkling incision cut into the sky makes you
give praise to God to thank him for how lucky you are,

lying in your warm bed with the heat turned on as high
as it can go, you try to dream of cliff draped islands and
the women of sonnets who may live there,

but you’re asleep faster than you can think of the cliffs,

and in the morning hunger is stronger than any other feeling,
the thought of your days after that like the thought of twilight
right before the setting of the most beautiful, liquid sun

About the poet:

An 8-time Pushcart Prize nominee, Jéanpaul Ferro’s work has appeared on National Public Radio, Contemporary American Voices, Columbia Review, Emerson Review, Connecticut Review, Sierra Nevada Review, and others. He is the author of All The Good Promises (Plowman Press, 1994), Becoming X (BlazeVox Books, 2008), You Know Too Much About Flying Saucers (Thumbscrew Press, 2009), Hemispheres (Maverick Duck Press, 2009) Essendo Morti – Being Dead (Goldfish Press, 2009), nominated for the 2010 Griffin Prize in Poetry; and the recently released Jazz (Honest Publishing, 2011).  He is represented by the Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency.  Website: www.jeanpaulferro.com * E-mail: jeanpaulferro@netzero.net

INTO THE NIGHT

Like the breaking of a bulb,

From our bodies is born
light that has grown already tired.

What is that spark that allows us to perceive
rejection in a down-turned eye?

The gentle foggy rubbing
of energy that gasps at the surface

each morning after playing dead for the night.

When the glass fissures
and babbles against the floor

and it grows very dark,
we say it has gone out, but something quietly lingers,
like a consciousness
orphaned by our dead bodies,

without locus of agency,
without physical purpose,
a weight no heavier than the origin of morning

Where the glass, stricken
with surprise, no longer
contained by a thin self,
joins the rest of the night
to search for a place
where it has been all along.

THINK OF HER IN GRAINS

She likes to buy the cheapest coffee.

She likes                     to breathe it in

with those who once sat at the table,

whose absences displace

more of the room

than their bodies ever could.

Perhaps they would offer you a seat.

Perhaps they would offer you a meal

of parchment,

each bite a scribble of the way

you wake up each morning

and wait for the sun

to erase you.

*

When the light gives back your eyes

and you accept them,

dry with becoming,

you’ll walk into a room.

There will be faces

just like

the ones you remember.

But they are not.

You will wonder

if your own face

has that same uncanny

resemblance to itself.

Then, you forget

why you had come all this way.

*

She haunts your skin.

This time she is dressed

in pins

and needles.

Nothing else.

She says          to hold her

or she’ll fall apart.

You think of her

in grains          sifted by the mesh

of            your  hands.

She likes to buy the cheapest coffee

so it’s not a waste when it’s all been spilled.

About the poet:

I Admire Helen Dzik

The name of our team
said it all
The Maids
Maybe that’s why
the softball committee
put a dress factory worker
and single broad
as coach.

She was the Polish stock
who didn’t comb her hair
wore polyester pants
smoked
and probably drank
good potato vodka
when we’d lose again.

No one called her
an old maid, or old.
She played tough.
When she stood
on the first base line
and said to run,
you better damn well run.

This field was her joy.
This brief respite
from sewing hems
because where
a softball flies
is not as predictable
as finding the perfect stitch.

I didn’t understand
the game
made her smoke less,
sorrow more.
No one on the bleachers
to wave to her or smile.

When the shortstop
couldn’t catch
that oh so easy line drive,
Helen screamed.

We gave the other team
so many chances to score.
The spectator might have thought
we were the farthest thing
beside maids.

I caught that ball
in the outfield
all that hard solitude
in my glove

before I even knew
what made Helen hurt
was outside the fence
as I threw toward home.

Pas De Deux

Twirl, spin
until you go
from 4 to 31
at McCann’s School of Dance
to the point
where you stand
toes turned five digits
counting to perfect

5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

This from a girl
who lasted one class
whose closest trip to Julliard
is watch the 8 o clock public TV version
of Swan Lake
by the New York City Ballet.

I think it was the fascination
with those ever so black leotards
scraping my skin
choreographing my skeleton
to dance
Into and not away from flesh.

How foolish
not to learn
how to arabesque
standing at the tow bar
growing taller.

I only stayed
in Ms. McCann’s ballet
for one hour.
Maybe it was because
I couldn’t pull my hair
into a bun
like the other kindergarten prima donnas.
That trauma
of having my long hair
severed by scissors.

My preschool teacher
said my curls
caught the wind
the wrong way.

If you ask me
about modern ballet
I’ll throw you some names
Martha Graham
Alvin Ailey.

Make myself appear
as cultured as the pearls
who only throw a glare
inside the jewelry box
and forget the glow
around my neck.

I want to twirl for you
but I don’t know
the meaning
never mind the step

French doesn‘t plie along these lips
and our mouths
don’t grace the tongue’s pirhouette.
Two muscles bend
to meet the other’s motion.

You don’t surrender
as a principal ballet dancer should
lifting me toward sky
requires too much precision
and our lips don’t drift
beyond this Slovak kitchen.

Your house,
a replica of my grandmother’s.,
Gravy stains the stove
and the tablecloth
sleeps under the weight
of spoiled sour cream.
Butter erupts yellow volcanos
from its pink glass house.

Your Mom and Dad
waltz through air.
While Duke Ellington plays,
your parents are voyeurs
as you reach to kiss me
in the space in the kitchen
near the back door.

But this house
will never be a place for culture
or love of culture
even Degas
glorified prostitutes
as ballerinas.
Hookers posing as dancers
because this paid
the same as sex.

The prostitute always finds the right position
on canvas
suspended in air
stretching toward flight.

I leap somewhere
between her azure blue
and your gray muscle
down below
pulsing toward our Pas De Deux
struggling to fumble
on pointe.

For All The Girls Like Camille

I like the idea that you sculpt me into Camille Claudel
with all her honesty carved into stone.
I know that to chisel something real is not easy
and seldom without consequence.
You destroyed most of what you made.
She aborted her works of art with hammers
and all the slivers stick into my skin.
Yes, Rodin is in the Metropolitan.
What’s left of you lives in Paris.

Camille, I wish I could take you
to a diner in Moosic
where you could get a milkshake
and a smile.
You wouldn’t have to tell
the electricians or the truckers
your art was overlooked.

They’d appreciate your work ethic.
They’d appreciate the way
you made their faces,
tough but gentle.
It satisfies them
Your sculpture
of a man and a woman together
is worthy enough
of a full plate of bacon and eggs.

No one knows Camille, though.
No one knows me, either.
They remember Brittany Spears.
Those guys,
who like to wear a work belt low
would screw you more than once.

In the meantime,
Rodin keeps on making and mating.
He uses the word copulation
as if a better vocabulary takes the act
to a higher level.

Whether you date a millionaire
or a bordello owner,
we take off our clothes
throw the socks to the ground
and touch.

This getting on top of each other
is the cat coming back to the doorstep.
You want to keep feeding the animal
but you can’t let him in.

Camille thought about the guy at the Petro.
How nice it would be to get away from Paris.
To have a front porch.
A mortgage.
A construction worker holding your hand.

About the poet:

Jennifer Diskin holds a Master of Arts degree in Creative Writing from Wilkes University. She loves poetry, all kinds of music and the fact the trees blossomed this spring despite our hard winter.

Dominoes

“Well,” my grandmother Della says

“Well.”

Those are her two words.

One used to answer the door.

One

for no judgment.

Only one friend: the Watchtower Lady.

an African missionary in reverse,  she

ministers to poor whites,

saving Midwesterners in South Tucson

from the bloody quicksand of Mexican Catholicism.

Alice, my grandmother’s strong coffee double

mirrors Della’s dense lard silence.

Twins, they wear imitation ruby

and emerald brooches, gold hands and starbursts

to clasp shut their slippery rayon dresses

over the deep valley’s of their breasts, and

a suffocating cotton candy of Woolworth’s perfumes,

“My Sin” and “Emeraud.”

Orthopedic tie-ups

Brace their ankles

against their great bulk,

heaped up like mashed potatoes.

Language comes out

Of ( their ) soft gorilla eyes, their

eyes lace together like fingers.

Every week Alice knocks.

Della opens the screen door.

She takes the pamphlet

with the cartoon colored pictures of hell

and puts it on the oak-painted-green kitchen table.

“Well,’’ my grandmother says,

and gets out the dominoes.

White cakes with black dots.

Ice melts in their RC Cola.

The only sounds:

the refrigerator hum,

my grandmother’s asthmatic breathing, the shifting sighs

of our oak-backed chairs.

Then, some silent call prompting her,

Alice rises

solid, yet in motion, an iron bell

of reckoning rings out

our door,

opens her umbrella

against shimmering sun.

My grandmother smiles at her one friend,

Their waves good-bye

fade into our swamp-cooled darkness.

Today, two Jehovah’s Witnesses

make their pale, dark-suited way

to my home in the prickly desert.

“Too busy,”   I say,  and

shut the door on their glittery-eyed, sunstruck faces

but take, for Della’s sake,

for her Alice,

their Easter egg colored pamphlet.

I Dream You Died And You Did

This nightgown binds me into sleep, lashes me to the bed, eyes
closed, into a blindness that leaps boulder to boulder.

Sleep is a small town full of strangers, one gas station and bad directions.  Sleep is blankets under your chin, your pelvis/his butt welded like spoons.  Rest,

you are so tired.  No one has slept for so long, listening for car sounds, home
arriving.  Where is your breast, my pillow?  I can’t go on

dreaming the arrest, my husband pulling the paintings off the wall, threats to
call the police.  Sleep is where we go

to be alone together.  Sleep is peace in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda.  My
grandmother had a great big sleepiness to her my grandfather

couldn’t get enough of.  You, love, draw a picture of
our hearts barely breathing.  Please, give me your eyes,

I will take them in my arms, kiss them,          kiss and,
close them.

The Magician’s Assistant

People turn their heads like spools to watch him

Pound the thick wood thin, his neck stretched up

In a swan’s arch, as his fist comes down, down.

Each day more boards are suspended in the air. Only by

The sadness in his eyes, the top hat stuffed in his back pocket,

Can you tell he’s a magician.

I expect he’ll climb the ladder again

And again. Others tell me stories of men who fell

Helpless on their backs like turtles, or of the whirring

Saw that jumped up and sliced its master’s head

In two halves. I just sing louder.

Tonight I turn your bed down. You’ve finished another

House of cards. You hold your ruined hands out to me, too tired

To take down your own pants. I lift your legs, heavy as fallen trees,

Up and lay you out like a dead man. I get in the box where you slice me

In half, trust is my nightgown. We dream of applause.

Red Letter

Dear Mother,

You were so lovely in your red dress,

red mouth, red claw nails,

playing golf with men’s red heads.

You gave me a small putter

with a red handle.

To love you

is to drown in the Red Sea.

Your anger is

illuminated, raging Hell.

You are the fire

we were always racing to;

fire is called red

after you.

You taught me all my reds:

Red blood,

red wine,

blue-red is cold

alone at night.

Did my father

have any redness in him?

Was it hard to be red, red, red

in the family’s soft, yielding

paleness

of biscuits and potatoes?

Our lives were anemic without you.

They dressed me mainly

in navy blue.

Mama, did you know that most drivers

who have accidents

have red cars?

They’re careful,

but other people hit them.

About the poet:

Charlotte Lowe is a poet who lives in Patagonia, Arizona, near the Nogales, Mexico border. Previously she has published in American Poetry Review, Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts, among other literary reviews. She has a poem coming out in the summer issue of Hobo Camp Review. She has worked for poet in the schools programs for 15 years in both Arizona and Texas. Her happiest achievements are reading her work in Paris and Prague. Most recently she has studied at Naropa Summer Creative Writing Program.

“Get rid of the crow

… enter the cave”

Maria Mazziotti Gillan is an American poet who grew up speaking Italian in an Italian immigrant family in Paterson, New Jersey.  She received the American Book Award in 2008 for her collection, All That Lies Between Us, and the 2011 Barnes & Noble Writers for Writers Award from Poets & Writers. Gillan is the founder and executive director of the Passaic County community College Poetry Center, which publishes The Paterson Review. She is a full professor and Director of Creative Writing in the English Department at Binghamton University in Binghamton, New York. She has many books to her credit, and her poetry has appeared widely, including previously in Ragazine. She is the mother of two children with her late husband Dennis Gillan. Gillan’s efforts on behalf of young and unknown poets and writers has made her an inspiration to students and acquaintances alike. The following interview took place in April 2011.

By Emily Vogel

Q: Most of the time, when I read someone’s poem, my first question pertains to whether or not the poem is autobiographical.  Sometimes, it is difficult to tell because the poet might conflate true event with elements of fiction, or the autobiographical aspects are merely obliquely autobiographical.  The difficult part about autobiographical poems is that it might make the poem and/or the poet susceptible to a kind of “vulnerability.”  Your poems speak from the heart, and evoke both empathy and emotional reactions.  Could you say something about the autobiographical nature of your poems?

Maria Gillan: For many years, I wrote poems based in the English literary tradition and I was anxious to hide behind language, images, and literary references. Then when I was 40, my first book was published, and a graduate school professor said, “You know, it’s in this poem about your father that you find the story you have to tell.” Then I thought, well I don’t have to be an English Romantic Poet, maybe I can be just what I am – a wife, mother, daughter, granddaughter, grandmother, an Italian American – and write poems from those perspectives. I began then to write more directly and specifically about events and people in my own life, and to be as honest as I could be about what my life was actually like. It took me a long time to have the courage to write with honesty, specificity, and directness. Gradually, I made my language plainer and plainer in an attempt to lessen the distance between myself and my reader.

Q: Your collected book of poems, What We Pass On, speaks a lot to the “shames and eventual triumphs” of growing up Italian-American.  I know that when you were young, you and your family spoke exclusively Italian in the home, and that you were presented with the challenge of essentially “straddling and reconciling two cultures” in order to establish an identity and develop a poetic voice.  To what extent do the pain and/or healing of your assimilation into American culture still influence your work?

MG: My ethnicity and attempts at assimilation have fostered my sense of connection to all people who are outsiders. Consequently, I think that my own struggles with assimilation and with spending so many years trying to erase what I was will always be part of my work. I think that shy, introverted, foreign little girl that I was has never left me and is always there inside, even when I think I’ve left her behind.

Q: You write a great deal about family.  What advice would you give to emerging poets about exploring the depths inherent in family relations, with all the hurts, celebrations, challenges, and wealth of love in order to weave these into their poetry?

MG: The advice I give to emerging poets is that they have to get rid of the crow in their minds, the one that tells them everything that is wrong with them. The crow will try to stop them from descending to the deepest places inside of themselves, the place I call the cave, where all their memories and experiences, good and bad, reside. The cave is where they have to have the courage to go, if they are going to write, if they’re going to be honest enough to search for the stories they have to tell. It is in specificity that we find the universal, rather than the other way around. The mind does not control the poem. It is the old woman or old man who lives in our bellies, who helps us to be wise truth-tellers. We need to learn to trust that inner voice, and not to depend on the intellect to guide us.

Q: You also write a great deal about your late husband’s illness.  What difficulties and/or reliefs have you experienced while exploring this in your work?

MG: My husband got sick with early-onset Parkinson’s disease 25 years ago, and I have been able to survive, I believe, by writing about this very human experience of losing someone I love over a very long period of time. I don’t think I could have survived the pain and terror of this experience without my poetry. I hope by exploring the complications of love and illness that it will help other people who are going through similar experiences to realize that we’re all human, and they shouldn’t expect perfection from themselves or others.

Q: Recently, I heard you read a relatively new poem, which employed “parallel/simultaneous narratives” in order to get at the sentiment of the poem and the experience.  It was about (for our readers) watching birds on the television in one setting, while also attending to your ill husband at the hospital.  There seemed to be a discontinuity of “time” and a juxtaposition of two typically unrelated things, while at the same time these two experiences seemed to reconcile and inform one another.  The poem was very successful. As a teacher of poetry, how do you explain this overlap and weaving of narratives to students?

MG: For me, “Watching the Pelicans Die,” was a very difficult poem to write, because I could not confront my husband’s final weeks directly, and it became commingled in my mind with the BP oil disaster.  The black slick of oil on the sand and water made me incredibly sad at a time when I was watching my husband die, and watching his hands go black at the tips. The poem is a howl of sorrow for the world and also for my husband. One of the prompts I give my students is to go back and forth in a poem between two seemingly unconnected things, and find something in common between them to use as a thread to weave the poems together. I did that with this poem, but I think more than anything the sight of that dying pelican brought back my husband’s death, and I wrote the poem a couple of weeks after he died.  When I started writing, I had the image of the pelican in my mind, but very quickly, the poem took off and seemed almost to write itself. I do believe that happens when you let go and let instinct take over. I swear it’s as if the pen is moving by itself. I try to encourage students to let go when they’re writing. Sometimes, when they think too much, the poem is wooden and ineffective. I want a poem to make people laugh or cry or to make the hair on their arms stand up. I really believe poetry is rooted in the body, and that we react to it by smiling or crying or laughing.

* * *

The Dead Deer on the Side of the Road

When I see a dead deer on the side of the Rt 17 west,
its hind legs pointing up to the sky, stiff as sticks, its body
crumpled and still

I think of you in the ER cubicle at Valley Hospital, your
eyes suddenly blank and staring, your body motionless.

A doctor says “he’s gone” and closes your eyes.  Just
moments before your breath was a loud rasping in your
chest, your fingers turned black at the tips, and the doctor tells me,
“you know, don’t you that he’s dying?  He
probably only has an hour at the most.”

When I see that dead deer, the way life is gone from it,
I cry for you and for the deer and for all the other creatures
lost. I talk to you, as though you were actually in the car
with me and could help me carry the cup of grief
that I try to balance in my hands.

Too much death surrounds me now, my mother, father,
sister, best friends of forty years, all gone and I mourn for
them all, but you who were with me forty six years, you are
the one I am afraid to grieve for, afraid that if I start I will
have to know that I will never fill the space your going
leaves.  I pretend to myself that you are still with me in our
family room as in this car.  It is only when I cry for the deer
that I am able to cry for you.  “I love you,” you said, the day
before you died.   When I came into the room you turned
to me with a smile that filled your face with light.  I will carry
that smile in my memory like a talisman, a worry stone that
I can hold and touch when I am most alone, most afraid.

The EPA Comes to Binghamton, NY

The EPA says there’s a dead  zone in the Susquehanna
River that is growing wider with each day.
Nothing can survive in it.

Some days I feel there is a dead zone in me
as the world I knew, the one with you in it,
has vanished, and the world around me
with its dying lakes and rivers, its endangered
water supplies, its polluted air, grows larger.

As a child, the air smelled fresh and sweet,
even on 17th Street in Paterson, New Jersey
and the stars were huge and visible in the sky.

Why do we ruin everything we touch with our greed
and hunger?  We used to eat fresh snow in a cup
with espresso and sugar.  Are we ever grateful

for what we have without wanting more?  How carelessly
I held you in my arms when we were still young and you
could still travel, your hand in mine in Italy and France,
Spain and Portugal, in theaters where we watched
the plays and movies we loved, in the museums we visited,
the folk concerts.  It wasn’t until later that I realized
what I’d lost and now, how heedless we’ve been

with the prefect beauty of the world, how ashamed I am
of all I have held and failed to protect and cherish

Emily Vogel is poetry editor of Ragazine.

“… writers writing in a way

that seemed like writers writing

the way people talked …”

An Interview with Lyn Lifshin

by Emily Vogel

The following interview took place via e-mail in April.

EMILY VOGEL: As a poet I can admit that at thirteen I also had aspirations to be an actress.  And ballet, well, it was intense from the time I was six until fourteen years old.  Anyway, let us commence this interview.  Can you tell me who or what has inspired your aesthetic choices with regard to poetry?

LYN LIFSHIN: Well it is an amazing coincidence that I got this question right when I am for the weekend at my place in New York where all my older books are.

How did I get started?  I am told, around three years old on a trip from Barre, Vermont to Middlebury , Vermont, where I grew up until college, I am told, (while) looking at the trees, I told my mother it looked like the trees and leaves were dancing. And she said I’d probably grow up to be a poet (though she named me Rosalyn, thinking that would be the perfect name for an actress). I think as the first born I got a lot of attention, a lot of books, but one I really remember and just grabbed from the shelf is “Now We Are Six”, by A. A. Milne. I adored the story of Pinkle Purr and the poem about Alexander Beetle and Butter Cup Days and Binky…. I loved that book, and how it survived I’ve no idea, but it was given to me when I was three. There’re a few little scribbles in it, but pretty amazing –  it is in great shape.

I started school at six, but skipped many grades because I read well before starting school. I had a simply wonderful third grade teacher who had us write poems every day. I still have a little blue notebook with those hand-written pieces, many based on things she’d bring in: a bough of apple blossoms, melting snow. So I had an early love of poetry. By fifth grade we were reading Milton. Being terrible in math, I am lucky poetry came easily.

I’ve often told the story of how I copied a poem of Blake’s from “Songs of Innocence” in third grade and showed it to my mother and said I wrote it. She was amazed I knew words like “descending” and “rill”, and not surprisingly she ran into my teacher, told her how amazed she was that I had written such an amazing poem. As a result, I had to write my own poem by (the following) Monday. And I had to use “descending” and “rill” in it.

So I got off to a good start really. My father, who I had little relationship with, showed one of my few poems to Robert Frost, who wrote on it “Very good images, sayeth Robert Frost… bring me some more poems.” By the time I had more, he was dead. But that bit of praise went a long way in giving me confidence. Still, I started in theater in college, and then, feeling I needed a way to have a real job, I majored in English literature with a minor in art history. I thought I would get a Ph. D., get a good job and then write. Though I finished all the course work for a Ph. D., got all “A”s , passed Italian and French language exams and had 100 pages of a dissertation written, somehow, as the department said, there was a personality conflict between their new English faculty member and me. And in the end, I walked away from finishing the degree.

EV: So it is evident that your mother was a great influence on your poetry, and also the teachers you had in elementary school.  When I was in fifth grade, we were introduced to the limerick form.  Could you tell me a bit about what forms have inspired you and which forms you are devoted to?

LL: When I left SUNY (State University of New York), Albany, I walked out into traffic with no idea what I would do. I knew, or felt, I wanted to be as far away from anything Academic as possible. I painted for a while, was asked to display my paintings, have a very few on my web site. I took a job at an entertainment TV station. During the quiet weeks, I began to type up the few poems I’d started. I ordered a copy of Len Fulton’s “International Directory” – a slim stapled, I think, directory at the time, and sent requests of sample copies to every magazine listed. I got a quick overview of what was being published. And, I wanted to get as far away from academia, as far from 15th and 16th and 17th century literary.

I started sending out poems that summer, and luckily the first submission (actually the second – the first submission  – I can even remember the mail box I sent it from — two haiku pieces – two variations of the same poem ) was accepted. I was thrilled. It was from Folio magazine, an attractive magazine from Birmingham, Alabama. That was followed by an acceptance from Kauri magazine, a poem, the first of many they would accept and publish.

It was an extremely exciting time. I was daily finding wonderful poems that thrilled me. I’d done my Master’s thesis on Dylan Thomas, and an undergraduate thesis on Federico Garcia Lorca. And had my rough draft of Wyatt and Sidney – I still really love Wyatt, but I discovered poets like (Charles) Bukowski and Anne Sexton and (Sylvia) Plath … writers writing in a way that seemed like writers writing the way people talked: William Carlos Williams … it was like finding jewels every day.

When I began to write, I wanted to read and publish in the least academic magazines I could. I was charmed by Wormwood Review, Marijuana Quarterly, Goodly Company, Trace, Lung Socket. I avoided any magazine with a university connection.  Of course, that changed eventually, but I wanted magazines like The Outsider with their special Bukowski issue. These are the magazines I submitted to, read, collected.

I was happy to publish regularly, to be the most published poet in Rolling Stone. I was chosen early on as one of one hundred most promising young poets – that was special to me. It attracted mostly good attention, but one well known promoter called, wanted to send me air fare to come out to LA to see if  I really looked as good and interesting as I seemed in that photo. I didn’t go, but the one phone call triggered at least one poem that is in my new book, “All the Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me Living and Dead,” All True, Especially the Lies.

Now, my tastes are much more catholic. You can get an idea of some writers I love (not all — there are so many), in the three anthologies I have edited:  “Tangled Vines,” “Ariadne’s Thread,” and “Lips Unsealed”.

As for forms I am addicted to, I’d say there are none. Sometimes I try my own vaguely like a villanelle, but with its own variations. I wrote haiku early on and some sonnets, but I have not worked with form that much.

EV: It seems that your philosophy for poetry is that it is a daily practice, not just an occasional hobby.  Being a poet myself, I have more than once been accused of “poetry as obsession.”  Do you find that poetry can be addictive, or that it is just simply one of the necessities of daily life?

LL: I would say yes to all the aspects of obsession, addiction and something I have to do every day. Once I said that the word in the Eskimo language for “to breathe” is the same one as to make a poem. I believe and feel that. Of course I am obsessive about a lot: ballet, ballroom , horses, Abyssinian cats, horse like Ruffian and Barbaro – velvet, clothes, silk, soft leather…. So “Yes” to all you suggest!

EV: You have obviously written an enormous amount of poems.  Do you ever get stuck in the rut of an image, word, phrase, or topic that wants to be recycled?  In other words, what have been your experiences with “writer’s block” and how have you overcome it?

LL: I should cross my fingers before saying I rarely have writers block. Ironically, in college I was afraid to take a creative writing course, afraid I would have nothing to write about.

I am pleased my new book “All The Poets (Mostly) Who Have Touched Me (Living and Dead: All True, Especially the Lies,” is out and getting strong reviews, “…a tremendous book along the lines of John Berryman’s Dream Songs” … “mind candy” … “witty … lusty … a feast of words.” If you are a poet, know a poet, or are wild for the secrets of writers you may never have heard before, this is a book you shouldn’t resist.

——————————————

DRIFTING

things I have and
don’t have
come from this
moving between
people like
smoke. I’ve been
waiting the way
milkweed I
brought inside two
years ago stays
suspended, hair in the
wind it seems to
float, even its
black seeds don’t
pull it down
tho you don’t under
stand how any
thing could stay
that way
so long

LIGHT FROM THIS TURNING

I have lost touch with
distant trees,
the wind you brought
in your hair
and lilac hills.

Something different
bites into the river
and the river of lost days
floats over my tongue.

Love, you are like that
distant water, pulling
and twisting,
you turn me

apart from myself
like some frightening road,
something I don’t want
to know

Still, let my
hair float slow through
this new color,
let my eyes absorb
all light

from this turning
that has brought us
here, has carried us
to where we are,
we are

NOT THINKING IT WAS SO WITH YELLOW FLOWERS

At night I
dreamed that
same dream,
the one
full of muscles
and thighs
that aren’t you.
Later the fear
came back
crossing into
Mexico tho
at first
when I woke up
I thought it
wasn’t true
the air was so
bright and
yellow flowers
were falling
from the
pepper tree
like suns

——————————————

New Books by Lyn Lifshin include “Ballroom” and “ALL THE POETS WHO HAVE TOUCHED ME, LIVING AND DEAD. ALL TRUE: ESPECIALLY THE LIES.” Recent books include “The Licorice Daughter: My Year with Ruffian,” “Another Woman Who Looks Like Me,”Following Cold and comfort”, “Before It’s Light, Desire” and “92 Rapple.” She has over 120 books and edited four anthologies. 

For more information, visit: www.lynlifshin.com

I Know Who Built the Pyramids

I came in cold.
Some guys I work with were gathered around,
staring at a paper, pinned above the time clock.
It was pinned in a crooked way, done in haste,
in a manner without regard for those eyes that fell upon it now.

Just a paragraph, colder than the winds outside.

Due to a lack of orders in our backlog,
we are looking for volunteers for layoffs.
Those who are interested see Human Resources.

The rest of the page reflected our faces, blank and drained of color.
Layoffs.

The roof was leaking from the rain and melting snow.
Everywhere there were buckets catching drops of water,
and puddles were new leaks were starting,
and rumors.
Filling every bucket until they overflowed.

They’re looking for twenty guys,
if not more.
If they don’t get volunteers then
they look to the junior employees.

New puddles,
no one even tries to control.

We might all be locked out.
The leaks are overwhelming.
We might all be in the unemployment line.

No health insurance then.
Not for the guy who has cancer.
Or the two, who’s wives have cancer.
Or the two who are expecting.

But fears are quelled when we work.
When we use our hands, amidst
the pounding of the machines.
We break a sweat, and it’s zen.
Denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
and acceptance all before we clock out.

Even by break time,
the boys are cracking wise again.

You see,
I know who toiled under
those stones at the Great Pyramids,
who fruitlessly charged at the German trenches,
cut a swath through the Burmese mountain range,
because I work with them.

I’m proud to be counted among them,
people who keep their chin up,
even though it’s where they get hit
every time.

Unlike those we work for,
our wealth is in misery and hardship.
And we consume it with might.
The might of David when he shouted the Psalms to God
from the dark of a cave.

Yes, we can joke and smile,
even when we walk the gallows,
and ask the executioner,
“Are you sure this is safe?”

We can laugh now,
because it’s either
laugh, or cry.

About the poet:
Steven Oldford is an unskilled laborer and freelance writer.  In all honesty, this is his first submission, resulting from encouragement by his former professor, Joe Weil.  Oldford currently lives with his wife, daughter, and a mountain of student loans, in Hallstead, PA.

Instructions for the Living, Part II

Remember that sometimes,

the dead do not go all at once.

Sometimes, the dead erode

like an unforgivable hillside.

This rise in the earth

from which you better viewed the world,

so unmoveable beneath the stomp

of everything else, is slipping away

in an unremarkable rain.

But so it is.

Their roots have let go of all they were,

bit by bit, until they hang

an embarrassing naked,

limp and pointing down at what was shed.

As if you needed a reminder

of what had been lost.

You find yourself wondering,

which piece was it?

Which piece, with its sloughing off,

turned him from father to shell?

The left hand’s refusal to palm

a morning coffee? A missing name

that even your dear and insistent face

could not call forth?

Do not do this math.

It is one of those things, like love,

that doesn’t need your permission.

How I Learned My Multiplication Tables

One is quiet, stoic, but knows more

than he lets on. Two is the mother of

everything else, even odd and unruly

children. Three is the artist. Four is a

sharp suit, he sets up the deals for Five,

the banker. Six likes to gossip. Seven

is a freak. Eight is almost there, pulled

together but still trying too hard. Nine

is who everyone dreams about. Ten is god.

Old Love

They say this is what the married become:

An old mill, churning at nothing but the

water’s insistence; romantic in the forgotten

sense of the word. Sex will have

the satisfaction of a hard day’s work.

Your lover is your husband and no magic

is an everyday affair. To them

a heart must seem an appeasable,

if not bored,  thumping marker of time.

There is a growing piece of my heart

that wants me dead. On days when it beats

the thick muscle of my chest I am filled

with soured wine. There is no mistaking

its sediment collecting in the corners

of my mouth.  I am, each week, an unnamed

fear. Everyone who has ever loved me

becomes a fool. Everything I have ever touched

suddenly wishes it were whole. Every word

of comfort unspells itself. And when this

Tuesday afternoon, this Sunday before dinner,

this Friday before bed, is that last I want to see of it all

I find the man whose arms are old paths

and his mouth, a river. I go to him to drown.

In this ordinary small of a back I leave my ugly name.

This pocked and speckled shoulder I will bite until forgiven.

These eyes demand beautiful, beautiful, beautiful

until I breach from the sheets

a belated crescent moon,

glistening and spent.

God bless those who are so sure

what old love must be.

God bless the untroubled heart

that has never made love

to save itself.

About the poet:

Emily Kagan Trenchard began writing poetry while at the University of California, Berkeley, where her work was commissioned for an address to the graduating class of 2004. Her work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and she received an honorable mention in Rattle’s 2009 Poetry Prize. Emily holds a Master’s in Science Writing from MIT. She lives in Brooklyn where she is a co-curator of the renowned louderARTS Project Reading Series.

Digression on a Sign:  Welcome to Sea Isle City

Where the sea grass by the bay can get to be twelve feet tall
and the dogs are so old  they can’t be bothered to bark at passers-by.
They just come out to look at you and turn right back into their houses.
There’s something welcoming about a quiet dog.

My grandfather used to say most animals are nicer than most people.
Black bears, for instance, won’t come near you in the woods if you
sing loudly or clap as you walk.  And if you’re a stupid, 19 year old
camp counselor and walk back out to your unit after a night off  in
Main Camp with no flashlight and you come right up on a bear she’ll
just run like hell in the opposite direction you’re running.

My son might disagree—he was trapped in a latrine once, a black bear
scratching to get in—but he disagrees with me on most things, so maybe
I should tell him his teacher is wrong and you don’t need trigonometry
to be a functioning, happy adult.  I don’t think I’ll tell him how I got
a fifty-seven on my trigonometry regents in high school, though.
He couldn’t keep that secret.  Animals are better secret keepers.
My dogs, although the smaller of the two is pretty verbose in the
barking department, haven’t ever told any of my secrets, even after
they’ve  had a drink. It’s disconcerting when animals are like people—

sheep cough, for instance, and when they’re mating porcupines laugh
like perverted old men. Trust me, this is not a good sound to hear
when you’re camping in the  middle of nowhere in the middle of the night
and you’re the only one awake.  I always hated being the only one awake
at slumber parties when I was ten.  I’d hear a weird noise and say “what
was that” and when no one answered I knew I was the last one awake
and I was responsible for the others, like the designated driver or the
mom who sets up the carpool.

Some moms try to make you feel guilty because it’s your third child
and you know he won’t die if he drops his pacifier and you just blow
off the bigger pieces of dirt and pop it back in his mouth.  I wonder,
were these women really concerned for my baby’s welfare?  I wonder
why they felt welcome to make such comments to me.  I wonder too, at
road signs that say things like “Welcome to Sea Isle City” or Welcome
to New York State” or “Welcome to Pennsylvania,” as there’s no way
every single person who crosses town or state lines is actually welcome.

Some people are about as welcome anywhere as a porcupine in a latrine.
Did you know that if you don’t keep the outhouse doors shut porcupines
will come in and chew around the seat?  They like the salty taste of the wood.
My ex-husband used to laugh about the time at his uncle’s cabin in the Catskills
When his uncle caught a porcupine and swung it around by its tail and let it go
and then it was stunned enough so he could bash its head in with a rock.
“They eat wood and wreck things,” he told the kids.

This uncle wasn’t all bad though, he once gave me “mountain coffee”
(with a shot of whiskey) at eight A.M. and said I would always be
welcome in his house because I helped him wash the cabin windows
with newspaper, which is the best for ending up with no streaks.

Porcupines don’t have too many redeeming qualities.  They aren’t
really welcome anywhere, especially if there are dogs, even though
dogs are way more stupid than porcupines—case and point—my brother’s
dog tried to bite porcupines at least five different times, you’d think she
would learn, but you love them anyway, dogs, even if they’re too stupid
to stay away from what hurts them, unlike bears, who run from people
given half a chance and we don’t love bears, we love dogs because we
can leave them home alone all day and forget to feed them and they’re
still supremely happy to see us and welcome us unconditionally home.

How I Could Do It

He slept in a plastic crib-sized bed.  It was like a racecar,
and the mattress sank with our weight as we read to him,
the smell of urine faint but definite. His dandelion-down
hair tickled my nose and I knew I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t
even read to him without choking. “What’s wrong, Mommy?
Sing!” he said, and I said “just a tickle, just a frog taste
in my throat,” but I sang a little, then he slept.

It was as if he knew. What if he wanted me in the night
on his father’s night? He wasn’t even four. Later I heard
small, soft vibrations–feet pajamas on carpet. “I can’t sleep,
he said.  It was two AM.  I was still up, still trying to decide.
“What’s wrong?” I said. He grabbed me. His neck smelled
like aspirin. He said “I had a dream about hands. I was afraid,”
which is why I decided not to decide, at least not tonight.

Then in preschool later that week: “He doesn’t listen.
He stands on his head. He laughs when we punish him,”
his caregiver said. “He hit Sarah with a train today.
Is there anything wrong at home?” They say children
internalize tension.  I say, hey, he is loved. I pick him up early
when he bites the black-haired girl on the arm. Her mother
shows me the marks—two berry red half moons. He blinks
like he’s never seen them before.  He says, “She tasted sour.”

About the poet:

Svea Barrett is a writing teacher and a mom of three teenage boys. Her chapbook, Why I Collect Moose, won the 2005 Poets Corner Press Poetry Chapbook Competition, and her work has appeared in The Paterson Literary Review, Samsara Quarterly, The Journal of NJ Poets, Caduceus, US 1 Worksheets, Ariel XXVII, and other online and print journals.