Muscle Memory

If the muscles remember
every wrap and release, how
they must mourn the loss of love,
and time spent loving.

What widow does not ache
for her husband's hips to embrace -
What former rider forgets
the pulse of trot beneath her -
What retired sailor doesn't yearn
for the sea's swell, its surge
of surf and tide ?

Does muscle memory also hold a place
for anticipation ? For fear ?
Or, is she like her sister, Cognition,
that once she changes her mind
can no longer remember
her original position ?

Like the amputee who still feels
the impulsion of his phantom legs,
this memory is far more honest
than intellect, more loyal
to our bodies, than our brain is
to our fickle minds.

~ ~ Ellen M. Taylor

First published in  Humming to Snails, Moon Pie Press, 2005

Rorschach

My life as a hut, roar
shack, no

joke, all joke, ink
blot, ink botch, take a guess, live

a guess, look at this mess, an
ink

spill. My life an inked
shape on a page, a writer, an eraser, here

is my drafty shack, my hovel, I have
at it, tilt at it, go full tilt, half-tilt, full blot,

blottingly. And with this blotty paw
hand you this blotesque self

poured
onto, into, through a page.

~ ~ John Levy

From: Twelve Poems,  tel-let online, 2006

Oranges

When one wakes in the night
despite sleeping pills, white
noise machines, orthopedic
pillows, and thinks of oranges

-- such sweetness -- there it is,
that orange, floating brilliantly
in this dim room -- and all
the things one must make sense

of -- Nehru jackets, bouffant
hairdos, threatening french
nails -- your attachment to top-
less bars, those artificial orbs,

that tooty fruity booze -- all
this demanding explication
in the swoony night with its
train whistles and sock-it-to-me

buzz, love, American style, the ed-
ification of this planet's turn to
darkness, the rebellious suicide
of the sun, the sweetness of

oranges -- where is Lawrence
of Arabia when you need him
to peel this open, to hand you,
one-by-one, these white-veined

crescents, dripping with light?

~ ~ Sharon Brogan

What Can Be Seen

I've been thinking, again, of you
and others. How something we don't
understand binds this universe
together. That the dark

matter of our brains may be what
makes us who we are. How instinct,
genetics, and experience weave
together in a rope

we may use to climb or tie or hang
ourselves. Or others. How my brother,
finally, released my hand, and died.
This snow will, soon,

release itself into air. I am thinking,
again, of hearts: their dumb stamina,
their unseen flaws and missed beats.
That we can test only

that which we can see. Or that which
leaves a mark, some evidence of its
existence, if only for a nanosecond,
if only on a graph.

Are we constructs? Is there a formula
which expresses you, which expresses
me? How our blunt hands hold on.
How they let go.

~ ~ Sharon Brogan