After the Miscarriage

It’s the first three drinks you’ve had in months
and you want to shop. We go to Hanson’s
end-of-year sale. All their log furniture is marked

half-off. We pick two Adirondack chairs, a plant stand,
table wide enough for a stack of books, maybe a cocktail
or two, something to drink while we sit in the living room

tonight and watch bugs bang around the lamps. First
you want to try out a spruce bench carved
in Southwestern sunset motif with armrest wings.

We sit and wait for it to lift us through the ceiling,
above the roof and deep into cactus country. Imagine
how good it will feel to drift forever

and never think about missing something. But that’s
too much. We head back toward the nursery sets,
climb in their biggest crib and sleep.


~ ~ Dave Jarecki

in the end
you still
live
in me
like clouds
in a vernal pond
whose sky
has vanished

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing,  Salt Publishing, 2009.    With permission. 

Stillbirth

On a platform, I heard someone call out your name:
No, Laetitia, no.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing,
but I rushed in, searching for your face.

But no Laetitia. No.
No one in that car could have been you,
but I rushed in, searching for your face:
no longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two.

No one in that car could have been you.
Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen.
No longer an infant. A woman now, blond, thirty-two:
I sometimes go months without remembering you.

Laetitia-Marie was the name I had chosen:
I was told not to look. Not to get attached—
I sometimes go months without remembering you.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.

I was told not to look. Not to get attached.
It wasn’t my train—the doors were closing.
Some griefs bless us that way, not asking much space.
On a platform, I heard someone calling your name.

~ ~ Laure-Anne Bosselaar

  Published in A New Hunger, Ausable Press, March, 2007.  

Still Life

(for Emma)
Wednesday, 28 January 2009


Still, a breath away from life,
a heartbeat away from breath,
still my baby lies

her frozen hand
reaching out
to receive

the gift that was
no longer
mine to give.

Still, everything is still,
until I cry her cry and
shatter that stillness

forever.

~ ~ Jim Murdoch

Published in  This Is Not About What You Think   (Fandango Virtual, 2010).  

To Friends Not Knowing What to Say

To  J.V.P., B. Jan. 24, 2006 D. Jan. 27, 2006


It is mine
               to bear, this sack
                                          of dust, broken
rhythms of night’s
                            covered drum.
The wind has something
                                      to tell me.
Look how it tugs
                           at my sleeve.
In a dream,
                   I disown the alphabet,
unsaying each letter
                               in a song.
Who can repair
                         the questions
to make them hold
                              water or bones?
The drum renounces
                                 its echo.
Bagpipes offer us
                            the reed’s endless song.
Beside the river
                         two children are gasping
at a paper boat
                         swamped by stones.

~ ~ Robert Peake

Published in Iota, No. 85 (2009). 

As Ever

fresh and new-minted
the face
I love
in the gloom
of every dawn-dusk

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing,  Salt Publishing, 2009.    With permission. 

Other Mothers' Children

In Near Eastern places once held sacred
The sky is bright with rocket glare and
Other mothers’ children stare unseeing
From shattered hovels, no sweet, wet
Baby kisses from blistered lips with songs unsung
No family portraits to dust and treasure, just bodies
Some other mothers’ children rotting in the dust
Frozen moments of horror framed in blood
Limbs cracked and broken, bellies torn
Faces purpled, hearts stopped
Collateral damage, primary pain.

~ ~ Jamie Dedes

Published in Poets Against the War, February 2010. 

I heard

tell
of Mrs Kelly
seen
often
in Derry City's
cemetery
on a cold night
with blankets
to keep
her son
warm
and know now
I have not
remembered
enough.

                                         Dublin, 3 October 2003

Michael Kelly, aged 17,  murdered 30 January 1972

~ ~ Chris Agee
From Next to Nothing,  Salt Publishing, 2009.    With permission.  

Dark, dark the day when you I cannot see ...

Grief knows no hierarchies.

~ ~ Charles Bernstein

Excerpted from the Eulogy on December 31, 2008, for his daughter, Emma Bee Bernstein.

All the Whiskey in Heaven


Not for all the whiskey in heaven
Not for all the flies in Vermont.
Not for all the tears in the basement
Not for a million trips to Mars

Not if you paid me in diamonds
Not if you paid me in pearls
Not if you gave me your pinky ring
Not if you gave me your curls

Not for all the fire in hell
Not for all the blue in the sky
Not for an empire of my own
Not even for peace of mind

No, never, I’ll never stop loving you
Not till my heart beats its last
And even then in my words and my songs
I will love you all over again

~ ~ Charles Bernstein

From All the Whiskey in Heaven: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010). Copyright @ 2010 by Charles Bernstein. Posted here with permission.

Love

You will never return.  Hope means nothing
And nothing will alter it.  Love means something

Though:  you still exist for me.  Like the Big Dipper
Between the void of the two cypress, or a day moon

Against the shimmering stavelines of the heart's pylan.

~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing,  Salt Publishing, 2009.    With permission.  

The morning moon

in blue
Omega
like the dead
here
and not here
real
and not real
banished by
the daily
afternoon
pure and bright
ready for exit
at the moment's
gate
the last poem
always unwritten


~ ~ Chris Agee

From Next to Nothing,  Salt Publishing, 2009.    With permission. 

Tell Me Lies in a Dead Language

Perhaps it starts with genetics.
The knack of the body to remember
what the mind chooses to disregard:
gloom, heartbreak, and black eyes.
To routinely recall the verb forget
soon after a drunken argument
has leaned in close and shouted
sinister advice in your ears.

Each day, less of you survives,
and what remains seems fragile and disposable,
half-healed bones and broken china.
A penchant for shoplifting, sex,
and scotch before noon.
Scattered scars that outline your wrists
and bruises that ache, disappear, then return.

So you say that your husband is nice
in his own way, a statement as undecipherable
to me as Sanskrit.  You tell me lies
in a dead language and I answer them
with the comforting weight of silence.
I can only think of how at dusk,
as night closes around our world like a fist,
he will punch you behind drawn curtains
and locked doors.
If I believed in apologies,
I’d give all of mine to you,
mumbled like unanswered prayers
floating aimlessly toward heaven.

~ ~ Adrian Potter

From: The Shine Journal, Vol. 1 (2010).

Anguish

Sounds like something squashed, squished,
stepped on, lost.

An guish
rather than a guish, as if right off,

you began wrong.

~ ~ John Levy

From: Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs, First Intensity Press, 2008.

in between petals
of a tiny white daisy
this shifting world

~ ~ Donna Fleischer

From: "Seed Packets", Bottle Rockets Press Anthology, 2010

filling

with Spring light

an abandoned nest

~ ~ Donna Fleischer

Published in Kō, 2009.
Photo, with permission of Pam Harris.

Sleep

The young dog would like to know
why we sit so long in one place
intent on a box that makes the same
noises and has no smell whatever.
Get out! Get out! we tell him
when he asks us by licking the back
of our hand, which has small hairs,
almost like his. Other times he finds us
motionless with papers in our lap
or at a desk looking into a humming
square of light. Soon the dog understands
we are not looking, exactly, but sleeping
with our eyes open, then goes to sleep
himself. Is it us he cries out to,
moving his legs somewhere beyond
the rooms where we spend our lives?
We don't think to ask, upset
as we are in the end with the dog,
who has begun throwing the old,
shabby coat of himself down on every
floor or rug in the apartment, sleep,
we say, all that damn dog does is sleep.

~ ~ Wesley McNair

From Lovers of the Lost: New & Selected Poems by Wesley McNair.
Used by permission of David R. Godine, Publisher, Inc.
Copyright © 2010 by Wesley McNair

Birds change places the bare tree branches.

~ ~  John Levy

From: Oblivion, Tyrants, Crumbs, First Intensity Press, 2008.

Shelf Life

Now that I am older, books love me intensely.
They have forgiven my college indiscretions
of cracking spines and highlighting pages in yellow,
back when I was desperate to eat words.

In the bookstore, I converse with the paperbacks—
These books have no sense of history.
They yawn, flip their flimsy pages incredulously
as if they know it all in 200 words or less.

They just don’t get it, so I visit the clearance bin,
say hi to the one-offs and discontinueds.
This is a generous lot. They mold themselves to my hands
as they often do for anyone bookworming on a Saturday afternoon.

Like kittens in a box, they’re waiting to be adopted
by someone like me, who combs the aisles of the familiar,
looking for a slim gem or doorstop tale to anoint
the small place in me that can always make room for one more.

~ ~ January Gill O'Neil

Moon Questions

How is it that I can enter at the sea

and come back through the moon

Is the purpose of the moon the ache of renewal 

or an eager decay

The moon is what I do not have

on the other side of falling

So, why is my sun limited to moonlight

Do I consume too much of the moon

~ ~ Grant Hackett

moonlight
drifting on the river
emptying itself

~ ~ L. A. Krueger

alone
facing the cream-white moon
out of place

~ ~ Chen-ou Liu

Published in Sketchbook Sept/Oct. 2009.

         ~   ~   ~


the same moon
Li Po drank to
the same autumn
Tu Fu wrote of—
I alone change

la même lune
dont Li Po s’abreuvait
le même automne
que décrivait Tu Fu—
moi seul je change

~ ~ Chen-ou Liu

Published in Gusts #10 (Fall/Winter 2009), and showcased in Atlas Poetica  (Special Edition: Canadian Tanka Poets in French and English).  French translation by Mike Montreuil and Huguette Ducharm.

full

moon

belongs

to

no one

nonetheless

~ ~ Ed Baker

Lilliput Review #165 (November, 2008). 

***

full moon
clouds
my mind

~ ~ Ed Baker

moon

the moon is never
out of fashion

pregnant belly
curved blade
ladle bowl

pulling the ocean
& our own red seas
sparking darkest

lunacies ~ the moon
is never retro

~ ~ Sharon Brogan

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

Your Scar

My fingers roam
the soft flesh of your brow,
feel a minor ridge above your right eye.
It’s a small scar
not like the scuff of soldiers’ boots
or the woodcutter’s axe in a tree.
It’s an almost invisible seam
from a long-ago car accident.
No train derailment.
No plane crash on takeoff.
No guy taking what defeats him
out on you.
Just a collision from behind,
your head jolted forward,
smacked against the windshield,
a wound, some blood,
five minutes waiting
for your heart to slow,
your head to focus,
your eyes to turn toward
your father at the steering wheel.
It’s the tiniest healed incision.
Nothing like hearing in a hospital bed
how your old man didn’t make it.
Or your mind reliving that cruel impact
every night until forever.
It’s a trivial scar
that marks the constant anniversary of
everything, everyone’s okay,
it happened, let’s get on with it.
I hold you close
and kiss that scar,
ahead of time if need be.

~~ John Grey

By what
nick of luck

am I not
that magpie?

     ****

Going into the storm -
Not choosing is a choice

Tom Montag

The Wrong Guy

When you’re with people,
it’s a tossup whether to be
fully revealed.
First impulse is always
to clutch yourself to yourself
like you’re your own baby.
But when you start concealing,
you run the risk of concealing everything,
until there’s no one left
to receive advice,
to ignore it as best you can.
So, realizing
that one shame shouldn’t
bury another,
and a blush is just
the blood flow of a smile,
you said, “Yes, I’m going out with him.”
Then for the longest time,
you could feel their eyes
burning bible passages on your chest
while their tongues hurried back into cold storage.
Finally, one of them blurted out,
“Well he is a good looking young man.”
You slipped those words on your head like a tiara.
It shone so bright
that, for a moment,
no one could read
the stifling regulations of this world.

~~ John Grey

Local

Spring snow melt—
River rushing through
One ear and out the other

~ ~ Bob Arnold

Pearls of Wisdom

Here by the water's edge,
listening to what the sea brings,
I know deep down
even a grain of sand sings

wondrous things.

~~ Vassilis Zambaras

Haïkus au fil des jours

bibliothèque -

     le soleil passe en revue
          le dos de chaque livre

bookcase -
the sun reviews
the back of each book

dans le ciel

     et sur la colline

          le même nuage

in the sky

and on the hill

the same cloud

grisaille matinale

     des pelures d’orange

          sur le trottoir

grey morning -

orange peel

on the pavement

lumière d’aube

     rien d’autre

          dans la toile d’araignée

dawn light
nothing else
in the spider web

ticket de bus -

     juste assez de place

          pour un haïku

bus ticket -

just enough space

for a haiku

pelouse tondue -

     combien d’années de purgatoire

          pour génocide de pâquerettes?

cropped lawn -
how many purgatory years
for daisies genocide?

horoscope du jour -

     elle choisit

          d’être Taureau

daily horoscope -
she chooses
to be Taurus

ménage de printemps -

     un pépin de pomme

          sous le canapé

spring housework -
an apple’s pip
under the sofa

~~ Damien Gabriels

Desire Breeds Expression

A chubby cuneiform, these sparrows,
changing configuration with arrival,
flight, arrival:

yet the message stays —
a face-to-face over crumbs.

In one simplification, this is nature.
The rich and the strong surrender nothing
if possible, and yet, here,
behind desire, the other:
a different, chirping message —

light breeds music.

For even the butterflies, silent to us,
fight for sunny patches,
fluttering up in their twirling spirals
throughout forests. Are they lost

in war or in a dance?
How do we know the difference?

~~ Allan Johnston

First published inCezanne's Carrot, Vol. I, Issue 4 (2006).

The Lama

I cannot say where he came from
Possibly, from beyond the tall
Mountains, from Tibet, past crevasses
And glacial scress, like a high
Stinging wind. The bells on his
Pack-mule tinkled. He shuffled along
Peddling borax, salt and gold,
A lion-maned, eagle-eyed lama.

He travelled down the gorges,
From the Jadh Ganga to Harsil.
The beauty of Bhaioghati
Poisoned his blood. He taught
Himself to wear his curse like an amulet.

We chanced upon him singing
Of fires that burn, snows
That numb. Seldom does he speak
Of that serpent that has
Seized his tongue.

Mountain-dweller, below you
Stretches a plain that asks
Nothing of you. The river that was
Always by your side shall flow,
While you till and sow, and having
Unlearned language, relearn the
Songs of Silence.

~ ~  Smita Agarwal

Four Questions and Infinity


Where is home but in the choices

Why does the invention of zero take away one's strength for death

Shall one patient step following another relieve me of now

How does one prune :: trees who love their shape

Infinity is a box :: absurd until opened

~ ~ Grant Hackett

Monsoon Cantata

Rain is tattooing on the roof, tap-tapping
On the tin sunshade of the kitchen window,
Beating an insistent though erratic rhythm,
Deranged by dancing leaves that come in its
Way, like a chorus of mad women that seem to
Say - drench us, O drench us.

Across the barred, shut gate the road is
Gold and silver under the benign glare
Of sodium and fluorescent lamps; crimson
Tail-lights, tyres swish past. Criss-cross
Wires drip. A quiver of quicksilver water
Is rushing toward the gate - the barred, shut gate.

Something is knocking down the gate,
Something in connivance with the rain,
I turn my back to it, stare steadfastly
At the gas burner, at the metal frame of
Its round head with pricked-in holes.
Something has knocked down the gate,
Contralto voices come storming in,
Suicide-squad assassinations, communal
Conflagrations, scams, arms deals, a tribal
Woman gang-raped, mute deaths in custody,
India in the nineteen nineties. Something
Has knocked down a gate.

I turn on the gas,
Flare like the many
Blue, incandescent flames.

~ ~ Smita Agarwal

First published in Poetry Review, London, Winter 1996/97.

Meditation on Bliss

“Why write about bliss? There’s a war on!”

War was invented by the flowers,
as the English and Aztec knew.
Lavenders attacked jacarandas
with luscious scents and iodine.
Soon the rhododendrons learned
to poison the earth by opening blossoming
empires of color. The bees made golden
by pollen produced the honey that drove
the foraging Macedonians mad
in Alexander’s campaign.
Then petals fell in legion;
soon there were just the endless acts
of blossoming holding the flowery world
together.
Bliss exists outside
of time; it lives in eternal moments
inside and outside of war. It knows
the bloom of dust borne up by the bullet
that misses its mark, and leaps in joy
as the target stumbles beyond the sights.
It is one and is always winning.
It only demands complete surrender.

~~ Allan Johnston

First published in  Poetry East, #60 (Fall, 2007).

Mist in the valley
Memories of another time
Fades into space

Wasp in a room
Bangs at windowpane
Freedom is confined

Rainbow in the sky
A poet’s poet
Utters no words

~ ~ Bhuchung D. Sonam

Listen

He could not stop talking about her,
and when he could not be silenced
they arrested him.

Alone in his prison cell, he wrote of her
so they took away his pen and paper
and destroyed his words.

He scratched poems about her
with a matchstick into his soap.
They bound his hands.

He would stand by the window
of his cell at night
and sing to the sky
of his deep longing for her.
So they cut out his tongue.

He lay on his prison cot
and thought of her.
They could not stop his thoughts--
and so they killed him.

Does it matter who she was?
Who he was?
Let’s call her “Truth”.
Does that change anything?

This is not about him.
This is not about her.
It’s about Them
and what they can
and cannot
kill in us.

For every voice that’s silenced,
a thousand more
will take its place.

~ ~ Annie Wyndham
 
First published in Raving Dove Literary Journal, Spring 2009.

The Machine of War

The machine of war
used to be
a marching machine
like a centipede
coordinated by
hunger and need.
It’s mechanized now
and flies in planes
dropping bombs below
in indiscriminate rain
but still has
an insect’s brain.
 
  ~ ~ Diana Der- Hovanessian

Copyright © 2002 by Diana Der-Hovanessian. Reprinted from The Burning Glass (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY: Sheep Meadow Press, 2002), with permission.

Sometimes the House Breathes for Me, 
an Iron Lung

Sometimes the house breathes for me, an iron lung.
It happens at the panic point of some new poem,
often late at night or on a summer's evening when
the lines have grown asthmatic and the thought is numb
with fears of what the words might come to mean. It clunks
and grinds, immobilises - keeps my ebbing forms afloat.

Sometimes the house will be my ears, will listen like a bug,
an agent planted long ago in these primeval hills
to eavesdrop sounds of alder, owl and adder, bat and badger, all
their worlds - more passing chatter than would keep surveillance
teams on song for years to come.  It happens when the voices of
a poem drown the still small voice that gave it birth.

Sometimes the house speaks for (or to) me in an unknown tongue.
It tutts and putters like an outboard out at sea
and offers me the waves and rhythms it has found
among the deeper things that rarely come to be.
Easily mistaken for the muse herself,
it happens when I disregard her knowing words.

Sometimes the house imparts a kind of balance, like an inner ear,
tunes itself to keep in phase with thermals and horizons,
synchronizes movements with them in its posts and beams,
or eases its old bones against the cold. It shivers when
a poem's footings slide in shale - or when the lines strike out
to scale the heights, but then succumb to poesy's vertigo.

~ ~ David King

Born again
     now
   what

~ ~ Ed Markowski

Published in Lilliput Review #172 (October-December 2009). With permission of the publisher.

Crow Testament

1
Cain lifts Crow, that heavy black bird
and strikes down Abel.

Damn, says Crow, I guess
this is just the beginning.

2
The white man, disguised
as a falcon, swoops in
and yet again steals a salmon
from Crow's talons.

Damn, says Crow, if I could swim
I would have fled this country years ago.

3
The Crow God as depicted
in all of the reliable Crow bibles
looks exactly like a Crow.

Damn, says Crow, this makes it
so much easier to worship myself.

4
Among the ashes of Jericho,
Crow sacrifices his firstborn son.

Damn, says Crow, a million nests
are soaked with blood.

5
When Crows fight Crows
the sky fills with beaks and talons.

Damn, says Crow, it's raining feathers.

6
Crow flies around the reservation
and collects empty beer bottles

but they are so heavy
he can only carry one at a time.

So, one by one, he returns them
but gets only five cents a bottle.

Damn, says Crow, redemption
is not easy.

7
Crow rides a pale horse
into a crowded pow wow
but none of the Indians panic.

Damn, says Crow, I guess
they already live near the end of the world.

~ ~ Sherman Alexie

I wish I were fifteen again,
when the pain of a broken nail
was all that mattered

~ ~ Nazia Mallick

Self-Fulfillment

Such a dark and common
moment of purely human
triumph: to forget

a section of your life,
tell yourself in its place
a lie you can live with,

a lie you then come to believe
with all your heart,
one from which you take

your impetus to action,
a lie growing proud as a demon
to set you aflame

with a fading sense of its falsehood
and subsequent absolute conviction –
a lie like that is as good as Scripture,

a Gospel rock on which to build
a fortress, a slaughterhouse,
a beautiful tomb.

In the forest of your life,
you fell a tree and block your ears.
This clearing has always been here,

you tell everyone.  Always a barren spot.
See how the light glares here.
Maybe there was a fire here long ago –

in fact, you are sure of it.  You insist you were there.
Show off your burns. Use the scars
to chart your course out of the woods.

End up somewhere you never expected
as someone you aren’t, feeling
the gray rain on your ashen skin.

~ ~  Tony Brown

The Bird

The bird you captured is dead.
I told you it would die
but you did not learn
from my telling. You wanted
to cage a bird in your hands
and learn to fly.

Listen again.
You must not handle birds.
They cannot fly through your fingers.
You are not a nest
and a feather is
not made of blood and bone.

Only words
can fly for you like birds
on the wall of the sun.
A bird is a poem
that talks of the end of cages.

~ ~ Patrick Lane

First published in Beware the Months of Fire (Toronto: Anansi, 1974).

Kindness 

No one spoke to her much, how strange —
Not family or friends and even those who
Sat with us at meals couldn’t say a word to her
Or even look her way. That must be beauty.
But every time she went to town and was alone —
A pretty scarf, an intriguing handbag, forever
And ever elderly women in parking lots and
Aisles of stores sought her out. This daughter
Whose own mother wouldn’t speak to her
Had women without daughters
Eating seed from her hand.

~ ~ Bob Arnold

First published in Invent a World ( Mountains and Rivers Press, 2005).

Evolution

Buffalo Bill opens a pawn shop on the reservation ...

right across the border from the liquor store
and he stays open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week

and the Indians come running in with jewelry
television sets, a VCR, a full-length beaded buckskin
it took Inez Muse 12 years to finish. Buffalo Bill

takes everything the Indians have to offer, keeps it
all catalogued and filed in a storage room. The Indians
pawn their hands, saving the thumbs for last, they pawn

their skeletons, falling endlessly from the skin
and when the last Indian has pawned everything
but his heart, Buffalo Bill takes that for twenty bucks

closes up the pawn shop
paints a new sign over the old

calls his venture THE MUSEUM OF NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES

charges the Indians five bucks a head to enter.

~ ~ Sherman Alexie

Optimism

This space in my heart
intentionally left blank. 

~ ~ Katerina Stoykova-Klemer





 

not there, not yet

the gull still
becoming the cloud that chases the boy,
or the boy puts himself into the water
like moose or dark elk tasting lichen.
no, not yet: if you never arrive,
you never have to choose between trails,
one going up past the waterfall's steam,
another idling in the heat, stirred
by the strokes of gnats' wings–
the story doesn't have to end; the telling
braids words into watercress, the cry of the rabbit,
caught in the lynx' jaws, rings out
over the reeds, echoes never receding.

~ ~ Arthur Durkee

Daybreak

                   for Xia

over the tall ashen wall, between
the sound of vegetables being chopped
daybreak’s bound, severed,
dissipated by a paralysis of spirit

what is the difference
between the light and the darkness
that seems to surface through my eyes’
apertures, from my seat of rust
I can’t tell if it’s the glint of chains
in the cell, or the god of nature
behind the wall
daily dissidence
makes the arrogant
sun stunned to no end

daybreak a vast emptiness
you in a far place
with nights of love stored away

Liu Xiaobo

Translated by Jeffrey Yang.  Originally published in PEN America 11: Make Believe (2009).  Reprinted with permission of PEN American Center.

Rules and Visions

Life counts
the rules;
the sunset, their exceptions.
Rain drinks up
the centuries;
spring, our dreams.
The eagle sees
the sunrays
and youth, the visions.

--  Dimitris P. Kraniotis

line of footfalls lost
under fresh fallen snow,
no one left to see

~ ~ Arthur Durkee

Canada Geese

Their tribalism is what you first admire.
Flying in formation
they drop from grace
to colonize your world

laying claim to marshes,
a local ballfield, your berry patch,
putting green, when you are inches
from an eagle.

Their sentries, attentive
to your attention, stare
down your stare and you find yourself
ceding holdings one by one

but hold no grudges.  They
are as clever as Martians,
you believe, and the corner
of your lot was too wet to plant,

your aim too flawed for eagles.
Besides, several have stooped
to peck at greens, exchanging views
on your unwingedness.

In the estuaries of your past
you imagine bribes in some backwater
offered to centurions. Mere nibbles.
You start with twists

of bread, then to more exotic
shavings of Stilton, croissant ends,
and nod, knowing you will never be admitted
to their circle.

~ ~ George Ellenbogen

Published in Queen's Quarterly, Vol. 114  (Spring, 2007).  Republished in Morning Gothic (Vehicule Press, 2007). 

unreadable
the firefly's signature
on the night sky


swallowing
my pride
...heartburn!


the sudden amnesia
became an excuse
to live on

~ ~ Jörgen Johansson

Water and Words
      With thanks to Emily Dickinson

The only thing my mother feared of death
was the pain she wasn't sure
a woman her age should have to take

who was too old in her stooping years
to be afraid of God, needles, enemas,
or children's nagging tongues.

We tried to mother her the way grown sons
think they have the right, the supporting arm
around the folded wings, the voice straight

out of Jimmy Stewart or Henry Fonda.
I'd never use that voice with my own kids,
they'd laugh me out of the neighborhood.

I know enough I'd never try such guddle
with my history classes of oldfaced high-
schoolers chewing on the lessons of the past

with certain smirks before they rested their fore-
heads on the kidneyed desks they'd about outgrown.
But with a mother I never understood would die

I used forgive me life the sickly touch of sons
when all she wanted was a cool glass of spring
water to wash away the fog in her throat,
water that had been someplace holy, that

and a couple answers to a crossword puzzle,
just a couple hints so she could finish off
the Sunday Times for once, for good and all,
and guess that it and all things else were right.

~ ~ Martin Galvin

Published in Poetry Magazine (March, 2000).

My pines look both cruel and wise in winter's soundless drone

~~ Grant Hackett

Sundays

He was tall on Sundays,
his white shirt crisp,
his hazel eyes shaded
by the patio awning.

Heat from the grill
gave his stillness movement,
making him a reflection on water cut

by the ripple of a gentle current.

I imagine him steeped
in the smell of molten metal
and his own blood,

his youth left dead
under the hooves of a spirited horse.

The Sicilian field must have undulated
like an ocean wave, lured its prey,
snapped like a rug being shook clean
of dust and crumbs.

Maybe his brother
fell hard, with organs
bursting like flowers
blooming in a time-

lapsed film. Colors exploding
from leaves clasped
in prayer.

I picture his brother a leaf floating
in slow motion, back and forth on the gentle

breeze and resting
with blades of grass
tapping his face gently to see if he’d wake.

In that moment a mother lost two sons

when he was swallowed
by the ship, leaves of metal
clasped in prayer, cutting waves

that pushed against him, waves
that spoke in tongues
camouflaging him.

He had always been cut
by the ripple,
even before those Sundays,

cut in half
two brothers in one.

~ ~ Cristina Trapani-Scott

First published in Public Republic (January, 2009).

in the shop
a moth and I selecting
a wool sweater

~ ~ Djurdja Vukelic-Rozic

Often I Wish I Were

Often I wish I were

a potato.
Eyes opened
in all directions.
Unafraid
of the cold earth.
The difference
between life and death
for somebody.

~ ~ Katerina Stoykova-Klemer

Metaphor

The fire burns and I paint snowflakes
Into the picture for her, white flames
In her twists of hair, smouldering in auburn.
Something wrong with the canvas or brush
Or my artistry leaves her eyes empty
And her skin stroked cold. I finish
With something Rubenesque, yet Dali-ish,
Staring at a palimpsest of all she never was,
And all the things we might have been.

~~ Rob Radcliffe

Secret Machines

God is a secret.
You are a secret.

The man who lived with grizzly bears
got ate up.

He became like a bear;
smelled like a bear,
danced like a bear.
His eyes though
got bright not
dull like a bear with the long sleep.

He screamed.

In each of us
is a secret machine
and a secret animal.

-- JL Williams

The Conversation

Rain-soaked, the mottled bark
of the flowering pear darkened
past its texture’s vanishing.
My confessions always provoke
someone else’s confessions.
Why do you stand in the kitchen

if you don’t want to talk?
The changing light of morning
goes back and forth
as if it had already been
one whole mixed-up day.
Pear leaves tracked in

and out. The conversation
continues between windows.
Pear leaves shed around the house.
I thought by earning the world
I might have myself.
I thought you were listening.

Growth for this one tree meant
staying still. Still means
what it did then. Hardened
into a random texture
from the inside out and as we speak.
As if I could speak my heart.

~ ~ Katie Peterson

This poem originally appeared in New Issues (Western Michigan University Press, 2006), and is reprinted here with the permission of the publisher.

Winter Fire

Snow
is deep
around the lean-to.

The fire stick
spins
a bright eye
out of cedar,
a red coal
which breathes
with my breath,

flows smoke
then lifts
up into flame.

Small sticks
tipi-shaped
begin to remember
an ancient tongue,
the language
of burning,
bright words
borrowed from
the sun.

Heat melts
the snow into a circle

I lean
into its warmth
my hands
held out
like those
of a priest

But this sacrament,
this winter blessing
of life
Is one
which I receive.

~ ~ Joseph Bruchac

Where She Walks Doves

Where she walks doves
coo and bauble about her feet.
Grey feathers puff like dust,
rise as if from pillows,
fill the air like winter inhabits a home.

She feeds them seeds of grain
from her bare hand, sings
to them of mountain burns and fog.

Her eyes are grey. Her hair
is white as steam that comes off ice.
She has never seen the sea and
it frightens her,
the thought of all that water.

~ ~ JL Williams

Due North

I should have my hood on--
Already there are rumors of darkness.
I should see the stones set before me,
Giving passage towards a place
Of complex nostalgias. And now
Should see the scree falling

Endlessly from the mountain's summit,
Falling on the recessive plain.
It is a private place, a wilderness
In practice. I am told that I should look
For a roof in rain, for a river
Split down to tongues of ice.

I shall start all together. As hollow
As a drum, the ground sounds--
It summons, repeats beneath me.
It is as intact and unchangeable
As the seven stars spun into position
When the day, which takes hours to fade,

Has dropped away in its small mist.

~ ~ Joan Kane

Hello Songs

I’ve crooned these hello songs to so many, so often.
And after all the second guessing, handcuffed sentiments,

and self-sabotaging behavior, I slice open my surface
like an errant razor across the cheek. Sometimes a woman’s

touch is a compass, sometimes a tire iron to the skull.
It dismantles common sense and whole days go missing.

These curvy ladies with honeyed tongues and stilettos.
With their whispered discontent and ransom notes

penned in the finest cursive. They climb inside me
with flashlights – seek the voice box, the sweet talk

that’s been jailed in my throat for years, the words I stash away
for later enjoyment like a well-rolled joint. All the hello songs

that need to be composed already have, their memorized lyrics
now my reflection: each adjective extraneous, every verb imperfect.

~~ Adrian Potter

First published in The Poet’s Touchstone, Fall 2008

Four Poems

Each step into simplicity :: undoes the weave

Published in Lilliput Review #170 this year.

                    ~ ~ ~

Who can discover
why the smile remains
when they no longer see the child

                   ~ ~ ~

Because silence is not a conversation :: the nothing I had to say, I said

                  ~ ~ ~

The way I write :: there I live

 ~~ Grant Hackett

I Hate Poetry

I hate poetry.
It doesn't pioneer unexplored territory
or stand upon dangerous ground.

I hate poetry
because it's crafted with shoddy quality,
like a t-shirt sold at a swap meet.
It's all foreplay, no passion.
It speaks of romance without defining anything new,
ignoring how the mention of sex
clings like sweet mango to the roof of your mouth,
how a kiss can push whiskey breath
onto unsuspecting lips,
how regret glistens like sweat beads
on a sleeping lover’s body.

I hate poetry. 
It believes it can crawl
through the broken glass of the past
without bleeding and still
manufacture timeless literature.

Remember:  advice is just advice,
but never let words stand in the way of writing. 
Instead, twist them – as if they are nipples
and your ideas are the index and thumb,
applying torque until the words
become what you desire,
what you fear,
or both.

Show me what I do not know,
how to cheat to survive,
why hope hovers in the chest of men
despite the bell-shaped curve of misfortune
that governs our existence.
Show me these things instead.
Show me these things so I can love poetry again.

~~ Adrian Potter

Pure/Pour/A Priori

full moon’s rays spill
a skeleton path on water
tell me the spell
you held me under
simpler to undo
than the first split steps
I took towards you.
Wrath and swell
of the silt-black sea
heavy and mute
with the weight
of so much ice melting
returns agency
to me, and ease.
Eyes travel,
trace along the shape
of pure coincidence;
sere white falls hued
through night air,
valuable, and silvers
on the waves.
Shafts of light
unravel, reeling
towards shore: shine
relearns its shadow image
and I relearn more.
I can scarcely scrape
and scratch my eyes
across the moon’s rough
surface. To conjure
this drag and chase down
the fixed spines of time
and the firm arrival
at some great vein
of truth appears
difficult. My own
divinations, though, draw
me down the coast
and raise my eyes high
despite the bone-bright
glance of the naked
skeleton path on the water.

~ ~  Joan Kane

Americana, Station by Station

At our lowest price today only
vote Appelman for the school board
the Lakers beating San Antonio by 39 points
your sins will be forgiven

on mattresses all your favourite brands
because as a teacher he knows
in the fourth quarter a few minutes to go
so long as you accept Christ as your lord

name-brand comfort at a great value
what students need and parents want
yet another rebound - let's see that again
you are saved, I tell you, you are saved

~ ~ Carrie Etter

Fiftieth Reunion

I remember the roads, but the trees
are bigger.  Or smaller.  I remember
the houses, though some are missing.

If I look into the center
of their faces, I remember the people
I once knew as classmates.

Their eyes.  Noses.  The shapes
of the mouths.  But their bodies
are unfamiliar.  We are old,

but alive, and mostly hopeful.
Some of us are missing,
finally unfettered, unafraid.

~ ~ Jerry Higley

Lying in Bed with a Book

The book on top, a lover
staring into my eyes.
The wind outside fails to turn
the pages of this book.
Coffee on a nightstand,
its surface unruffled
by the story of terror in war.
In a great stillness,
the pages under my moving fingers
roll a dessicated thunder
across my sky.
The tree in the bed,
the shade of a disembodied, leafing voice.
I dreamt once of grafting a book,
pulpy extremity of the body,
onto my wrist.
From buried and paginated
heart to hand, from hand to eye,
from eye to brain, from brain to
beating and unsignatured
heart—so goes the bed's song
of a circulating energy,
invisible dust devil
on the Great Plains of the quilt.
Beside the bed, a community of absences
stacked up, waiting to be heard.
Now the linden outside the window leans in,
begging me to read out loud.
When I'm done with each word,
it gets up off the page
and lies down beside me in the bed;
soon I am surrounded by burrowing
words, who fall asleep before I do
and leave me alone under covers
like words in a book myself.
Bury me with books,
all of them cracked wide open.
No satin, only the feel of this legible
dry skin under my cold fingers.
Be sure my head is propped a little,
next to a reading light.

~ ~ Philip Dacey

The Quiet World

In an effort to get people to look
into each other's eyes more,
the government has decided to allot
each person exactly a hundred
and sixty-seven words, per day.

When the phone rings, I put it
to my ear without saying hello.
In the restaurant I point
at chicken noodle soup. I am
adjusting well to the new way.

Late at night, I call my long
distance lover and proudly say
I only used fifty-nine today.
I saved the rest for you.

When she doesn't respond, I know
she's used up all her words,
so I slowly whisper I love you
thirty-two and a third times.
After that, we just sit on the line
and listen to each other breathe.

~ ~ Jeffrey McDaniel

"The Quiet World" by Jeffrey McDaniel, copyright © 1998.  From:  The Forgiveness Parade, published by Manic D Press.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with the permission of the press.

Make It New

Shaking the parts of speech
like fluff
in a snow globe —

the way sleep scrambles
life's detritus.

Each poem says,
"I'm desperate"

then, "Everything
must go!"

(To hear something familiar here
leads to careful laughter.)

"Go" where?

The steady pressure
on the accelerator
can be stipulated
in advance

as can the stubby bushes
blurred by peripheral vision.

And someone will have set down
a diner or a gas station
at a desolate crossroads

and tried naming it
to evoke

the whole human situation

while
satirizing
the impulse to do so.

What that name will be
is the one thing we don't know.

-- Rae Armantrout

Of Chains

1. 

A problem exists
in the simplicity
of chains.

The tug of the load
is distributed among the links --

a sagging see-saw against
a guiltless weight.

2.

Every chain can
make me happy

with its clinging faith,
its cold, comforting slack

as long as the other end
is not bolted to a wall.

3.

Once again, there is
only madness in
the simplicity of chains.

No member in the loop
can communicate
the disfiguring motives
of rust.

Each link will understand
only when its turn comes.

~ ~ Khristine Ong Muslim

Poor Shoddy

shŏd´ ē [origin unknown]

She’s odd.

She’s nobody and knows it.
She shudders, all shook up
               in her shabby body
               her shunned body.
Can’t shed odors of a shady past,
a shaggy dog story of shitty odds,
               a soggy shack, slipshod
               shanty ’mid the sodden sod.
A sure lock on schlocky. Come up short.
What’s sloppy is near ungodly,
               what’s odious should be shot.
               Should die. Should she? Shhh. . .
Such damaged goods
the source of Schadenfreude.
               Shocking. Her show of shards.
               What a lot to shoulder.
Shut the shutters, shadow lady,
shut the shouting out
               (ah, but not the shame)
               the stab of an age-old jeer
that seems to call your name—
"Cheap shoes! Cheap shoes!"

First published in RealPoetik  (September, 2007).

~ ~ Jeanne Marie Beaumont

Age

There is always a trace
of prodigal dust
on porcelain

and a telltale
yellow stain
on the mattress.

Potpourri and snapshots
of smiling grandchildren
in summer afternoons

freeze time on the mantel.
The earthy smell of tea
and eternity mingles

as the rocker groans
the wordless hymn
of the passing years.

~ ~ Khristine Ong Muslim

We Giants

I seek a photograph.
Little red bellied snake seeks
a path I do not block.
I am the giant we fear, he and I,
the giant who owns no bounds
and scant courtesy, for we giants
imagine we were told we own
the likes of you, snakeling.

Fear the giants, lithe child,
cameras or not, meaning
well or meaning ill, for we giants
cripple beauty like yours
with our isolate pale fears.


~ ~ John Caddy

Coming to Grass 

                               Cornishman: a man at the bottom of a mine, singing.

They came to grass at the end of the day.
They climbed from the Dark to grass
and carried the Dark up with them.
After a long day of night with only
the head’s candle for light,
after aching hours of sledging iron
against candle-gleamed borer,
Grass was the surface they climbed to
through a thousand feet of Dark—

Over and over they pulled their weight up the rungs
as their hearts rang the ribcage,
to come up to light and grass-green,
but to carry Dark with them unseen.
Dark changed the strong men,
shortened their tempers, stubborned beliefs,
roughened their tongues—

Dark led them to think
they were the ones who could see.
But in the mine, in chapel, in pub,
Bearing this Dark is what taught them to sing.

~ ~  John Caddy

Regrets drowned in wine
will rise to the surface
to be swallowed again.

~~ Marion Sharville

sometimes, meanings

sometimes i want to tear at the skin of a poem
and see its heart beating underneath

sometimes i want to sweep through the clutter of words
and watch meanings scatter to the corners of a page

sometimes i’ll sit quietly as a poem yells until it’s out of breath
sometimes i’m embarrassed when a poem whispers its deepest desires

sometimes a sign flashes above my head in red neon
all types welcome
the poem more difficult than a game of chess
the poem thrusting its hips in the face of the reader
the poem confessing its secrets to strangers

sometimes i enter a poem
and all i hear is white noise
but sometimes it’s like waking
to the smell of fresh bread and coffee

and sometimes a poem returns at night
to find my dumb heart thumping a rhythm
as vowels purr in the throat
consonants pulsate on lips
and words float in the warm currents of the mind

~~ Cameron Fuller

Bird Men

There are no portals, and little wisdom.

Men jump from balconies with best wishes

for those below, hitting the sidewalk asleep

and dreaming of remote perches. They grip

metal rungs and arch backs in practice,

perfecting their pre-flight posture

in anticipation of the plummet. Trinkets

fall out of coat pockets, cell phones trill

on belts tightened against the leathered morning,

and handkerchiefs billow in the wind.

Wallets drained of bills strain against buttock-seams

and the cries of the birds sound quietly:

men stretch arms into grotesque wingspans,

thoughts of husbandry and fatherhood aloft

for a moment, then hitting earth with a thud,

cast off like dead plumage. Like crows who fly

from barren nests in search of gallows on which

to rest, or cardinals that shed vermilion atop

the corpses of brethren, men balance on railings

and teeter there, unsure of their flight paths through

this estuary of city skyline, this stasis precipice.

~ ~ Shane Neilson

Just Saying

It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.   
                - - from Philip Larkin's "Talking In Bed"

And I converse in double negatives,
that negation of negation that is pillow talk;
that not love could unsay, but there is not still,
not silence nor anything I don't mean,
and in this rush to unclaim declension
and any part of not you, not you,
or not unkind and not untrue,
at once, at once, it is not undifficult to find
the basest reasonings of will; and here, I am,
I am not willing to say these unsimple words,
but I am also not unwilling. The hinge of or,
the sulk of not. I stare. It is not morning,
nor night either. Your back does not balk;
It has no non. It is aware. Perhaps you will not hear.
I love you.

~~ Shane Neilson

Again

there you go again
playing the piano
with a hammer

shards of chopin
litter the floor
’round your steel-toed
beats

~~ Jack Cantey

Radish

She has let herself go:
the stringy gray-green mop,
stubble sprouting from her curlicue tail,
soil stains on a faded red leotard
bulging with crisp, white flesh.

Smoldering root, once
she drew fire from the soil,
hope, sulphur, and sex.
Plucked into air, now
she trembles in hand,
a scalded heart
still pulsing.

First published in North American Review (March/April 2007).

~~  Robert Peake

Glass Ghosts
"These lovely lamps, these windows of the soul."
--Guillaume de Salluste Du Bartas (1544-1590)

Lenses from Grandfather's bifocals
were ground into sand.

Now they sift through a
perpetual glass prison
in an hourglass heirloom.

Upon death,
the living grind glass
and add vision to the timepiece
so the rest of the chain
can see glints of stray light
and insight from
ancient eyes
that flash into
young pupils.

Each contribution
lengthens time
as each old ghost
lends a hand
to the living.

~~ Max Bouillet




Making Cole Slaw

Callous hands and crooked fingers
speckled with age
clutch a half head of cabbage.
Drenched with cold well water,
the head plucked in its prime,
before the wilt and rot
rape away its youth.
Envious are the angled fingers
that rend the head to and fro across the
grate. They rain shredded
youth into a bowl.

~~ Max Bouillet

Eyes

What was he thinking giving you
Such large eyes?
And that particular colour:
The darkest of browns.
Like being deep underground.
The colour moles and earthworms see
Right before they die.

Surely he must have known
That, as you searched the room
With your haunting gaze,
They would become gaping holes
Which I could but fall into.
Never to escape.

~~ Benjamin Russell

Mortality

Hard to imagine yourself
in the ground … a shabby mess
of broken spindles, the loom
that cranked out the cloth of you
smashed, scattered—and somewhere
the ego sputtering its rage.

You can hear it now—railing
like a mill-town dowager
piqued, let’s say, by the country’s
fraying moral fiber. Her spotted fist
gavels the tea-table, making
the bone teacups clatter.

"Oh! The very idea!"

~~ Joseph Hutchison

Weed in the Concrete

Such a wise crack
that lets such
a joke of a weed
sprout
inexplicably
on a vast, cemented
urban plain
like a jovial
burp
we can't
contain.

~~ Doug Holder

Coloring Book

Each picture is heartbreakingly banal,
a kitten and a ball of yarn,
a dog and bone.
The paper is cheap, easily torn.
A coloring book's authority is derived
from its heavy black lines
as unalterable as the ten commandments
within which minor decisions are possible:
the dog black and white,
the kitten gray.
Under the picture we find a few words,
a title, perhaps a narrative,
a psalm or sermon.
But nowhere do we come upon
a blank page where we might justify
the careless way we scribbled
when we were tired and sad
and could bear no more.

~~ Connie Wanek

4 one-line poems


~  against a snowy sky raven as a color

       ~  between statues the rest of history

              ~  heat lightning the dry burn of whiskey 

~  deep in space the red shift of my mind

~~ Jim Kacian

One Leg

long, dissociate
conversations about meaning
vacuums
the space we
associate in

me and I combine
passively in a
perspective of "we"
whereas "you" play
free agent

today "we" are
an enemy attacking
your independence
and must be
defended against

don’t you know
without all of us
you have only
one leg
to stand on

~~ Ivan Donn Carswell

Carpeting the Mind

Content in the luxury
of wall to wall love
we tend, with diligence
to keep the colours bright;
spreading the wear and tear.
Illumined in a shaft of light,
particles from other lives
intrude, swirling around us.
We pass through, wondering
if their dust will spoil the pattern.

~~Marion Sharville

Propriety
 
In silhouette, the large, dark eye
of the girl from India seemed
not to belong to the face at all,
but rather like a great, black beetle

attached to blind porcelain
and, maybe, about to crawl—
and the luscious lashes of unusual length,
closed & opened, closed & opened,

suggesting a butterfly's pulsing wings
clipped to a black-eyed Susan, say—
and for one tingling moment, I felt
I would reach out and possess this exotic

creature, this exquisite Agassiz humbug
and might have, but for propriety.

~~ Larry Kimmel

Carnal Knowledge

Having picked the final datum
From the universe
And fixed it in its column,
Named the causes of infinity,
Performed the calculus
Of the imaginary i, it seems
The body aches
To come too,
To the light,
Transmit the grace of gravity,
Express in its own algebra
The symmetries of awe and fear,
The shudder up the spine,
The knowing passing like a cool wind
That leaves the nape hairs leaping.

~~ Rebecca Elson

Another Makeover Show 

Rebels slash through jungle in Sierra Leone.
A renovation team invades a house in Sydney.

The rebels enter a clearing, and bullets fly.
The decorators move in wearing paint aprons.

Bodies lie in grass, covered in pixels.
In the backyard a new water feature brings energy.

A seven-year-old holds an AK47, looks right at the camera.
Stripping wallpaper is messy but fun.

The rebels decide to evacuate their village.
The decorators can’t decide between peach and lilac for the bathroom.

Women carry their possessions in baskets on their heads.
Well-placed ferns give good feng shui.

The women hold hands with children, already their backs to the camera.
The team is excited and ready to reveal their surprise.

Land mines and a three-day walk between the village and a refugee camp.
A blindfolded couple enters a bedroom, uncovers their eyes:

O
my
God

~~ Cameron Fuller

Two haiku poems

a nun wielding a broom
chases autumn
around the monastery

a bucket under the eaves –
one waterdrop falls in,
two leap out

~~ Zoran Raonić
Translated by Anatoly Kudryavitsky

First Love
Titian’s Young Englishman with a Glove , circa 1530

It happened in Physics,
reading a Library art book under the desk,
(the lesson was Archimedes in the bath)
I turned a page and fell,
for an older man, and anonymous at that,
hardly ideal –
he was four-hundred and forty-five,
I was fourteen.
‘Eureka!’ Streaked each thought
(I prayed no-one would hear)
and Paradise all term
was page 179
(I prayed no-one would guess).
Of course
my fingers, sticky with coffee and bliss,
failed to entice him from his century;
his cool grey stare,
fastened me firmly in mine.
I got six overdues,
suspension of borrowing rights
and a D in Physics.
But had by heart what Archimedes proves.
Ten years later I married:
a European with cool grey eyes
a mustache,
pigskin gloves.

~~ Jan Owen