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Tempting Traffic
Stefanie Lipsey
Because of the wheel
in my hands
and the blades
switching back
between light and noise,
a weaving of senses
and colors outside the spectrum -
the rain is mine,
the thuds hitting rubber
conduct silver wipers
sometimes coming into the black
sometimes coming into clarity
then dissolving into taste
beat a tempo to my internal clock
not sure if it is intentional
not sure if I can adjust to the light.
It is not an island drum,
when pitches hit like rain
on the Meadowbrook Road
invisible when I arrive
alone and deaf to the air,
his voice still rolling in my head.
~ . ~
Unemployment
J. Rutherford Moss
Stand back
and keep
your fingers off the purple sky
Watch
Everything looks like something else
Your lover's lips
look like birds
lost
flying north
in search of sun
the wrinkles near my eyes
the crack in the cosmic egg
What comes next
may be white
or maybe not
If it's a string
hold on to it
If it's spider web
let go
If it's a spell
scramble the long vowels
~ . ~
The Geometry of Dreams
Barbara Nightingale
Origins can find their own way out. Life
a parabola of hyper extended curves
intersecting the trials and tribulations
of an ordinary line. Where are the transformations,
the great leaps of dichotomous innuendoes?
Where are the rotations, the quarter and half turns
to which we all move at some point in time?
Look in the mirror at our reflections!
The plane is flipped, all our invariant selves reversed:
symmetrically, to be sure, but flipped nonetheless.
Have we become, at last, nothing more than fractal images
forming and reforming, repeating and repeating
until we are nothing more than an event,
a equidistant function of the same equation?
And what of the circle that surrounds us?
Bisect it, and we are all on one side or another.
Traverse it, and it is all the same again.
What can we do? Ride the circumference.
Ride as if the least common denominator-
what we all are-were a linear equation,
not this double arc of circumstance,
this sloppy slide toward radical expression.
Ride as if you really were going
Somewhere.
~ . ~
The Little Yellow Wheel
R.S. Plath
The little yellow wheel
of the tambourine
thumps in our skulls
the little yellow wheel
of the tambourine
clatters through our limbs
the little yellow wheel
of the tambourine
jangles against our ribs
the little yellow wheel
of the tambourine
tinkles in our blood
the little yellow wheel
of the tambourine
rolls from soul to soul
~ . ~
Cedar Beach Under Snow
Orel Protopopescu
Sometime when I wasn't watching,
tires pressed the snow into ridges,
hard waves, as if the sea had risen over
this beach long deserted by cedars
and frozen, layer upon layer,
to the asphalt skin of the parking lot,
these flattened Himalayas where I walk
on the roof of my world and remember
Lucy and her lover ambling across
white volcanic ash in the diorama
at the Museum of Natural History.
The two of them are naked,
as I no longer dare to be outdoors.
"Freezing," I say, taking the ash for snow,
not knowing, not seeing in the crush
of bodies, of acquisitive viewing,
until my younger daughter, home
from college, explains the pair
behind glass are showing us,
his arm about her shoulders,
how four feet left three trails.
Did it happen this way?
Two hominids walking so closely,
so entwined, his left foot makes a place
for her right, not knowing, not seeing
that by leaving these tracks of their affection
they are moving towards this encounter
with me and my youngest child, the one
born smiling, who knows this exhibit
as well as the house she's lived in
nearly all her eighteen years.
"They'll be on the cover
of my first book," she says,
arms framing the scene that will float
behind the words, Animal Affections,
and wants to know, "Can you own a title?"
"No," I tell her, but later think to save it
in this poem. Protective theft, I call it,
like standing in an empty parking place
or holding a smaller footprint in your own,
a strange new way to be her mother.
I see her eyes shining from the glass
over Lucy's face as I walk alone
on a beach deserted even by seagulls,
map of some icy future, frozen relief
covering a place where in warmer times
I had two breasts and firmly held
my children's hands, carried them
laughing, screaming through waves,
not knowing, not seeing the defective
DNA that would lead me to follow
like an archaeologist of my life, ghostly
prints on a snowy trail, wondering
where, besides my wintering heart,
our animal affections left their marks.
~ . ~
Blended Space: Seascape with Buildings
Lauri Ramey
Like the white domain of remorse. Thirteen
private houses, garden and fiction, meter and frost. Before
the 2100. I forced him to look. Do your job for the public.
This is not a king's parish but a precedent.
your shoulder, your voice
Back to the evening in question. Cultish and admiring.
No seduction is earned on the lake. Beneath, the way sounds
rise under clouds. Would anything. Pull towards the cynical array.
Stone as lemon. I do not know the relief of a kiosk abode.
Four times the promise is employed. Every door shuts.
ankle licks tongue
Near St. Martin's Cathedral, a star folds on its back. The floor
where I place myself is a tray of plywood. On the bas-relief,
a hand imagines your 6th century heat. Small beetles illuminate the lawn.
cobalt words pliant as bricks
August wraps my waist like cashmere. The show ends as signalled
by the curtain. Wrist on thigh. Morse's Oxford. Placards interfere with the characters. They must
have waited all day to say that name.
curled into his nap, sleeping between panes of glass
The test is a blank. Latitude of snakeskin, latitude of cornflower. Told
through other gestures, not her own. The conductor is in the backstory. Pictures
ravish the view. His body cannot own it. The mouth presides. Women are literary perceptions.
over and over and over, once the bed is floating
~ . ~
Fiddling While Rome Burns
Michael Rothenberg
Just because I know
it's only one interpretation
over another
and that's all history or love ever is
and whether we want to keep
or let go of our vanity or neuroses
or not
we'll still be visited by
the hobgoblins of humanity
not simple-minded
just signed up
for the program
(cheesecake, fried shrimp, linguini & chocolate)
the only thing i can imagine
beyond that
is another world
and more worlds after that
~ . ~
Greedy
Patti Tana
We leave this life with what is
in the pockets of the heart.
Untie the laces, undo the button,
this one is dead.
Papa would say that life is
ky und shpy, chew and spit,
then he'd close his eyes and
turn his face toward the sun.
We spend a lifetime learning what dogs know.
The map of warm light on the floor
as it moves through the day, the sound
of a key unlocking the door,
taste of fingertips and cheek,
the pleasure of caress.
The life I chose is rich
in harmonies and contradictions.
The life life chose for me has fistfuls
of feeling both joy and surrender,
explosive surprise and islands of peace.
When people ask if I'm afraid of death
I say death is nothing. How can I be
afraid of nothing? I'm afraid of losing life.
Life is something and I am greedy,
greedy for the something of life.
Not the trinkets, but what we carry
in the pockets of the heart.
~ . ~
Bedside Observations
Mary Jane Tenerelli
It's the women who walk
The dead to the door;
The women who translate
The shriek in the trees.
They catch the news
Winging
Along in the air,
And start
The soft talking
Of somebody's love
Out of their lives
And into the wild blue.
There is much to sustain
And something that sickens
In the belly of the burden
Of the black crow's caw.
~ . ~
Old Girl's Self-Portrait Collage
Susan Terris
Torn like the paper
Torn like the blue-black-white
Of surf in a storm
Torn gulls fly a timeless line past
Torn horns of the waning moon
Don't ask about the eye
Afloat in the water
Don't call it a boat or cast-off kiss
But an eye swollen from tears
Eye of the storm eye of night my own
Sad red eye
The gulls fly and keep flying
The moon will not let them rest
Their heads or hearts or mine
And I've fallen from a foolscap sky
To a riptide where I'm drowning
All torn up
~ . ~
Traps
Jim Tyack
Larry finds some snares in thought itself,
dilemmas in the attic like the wounded duck
in Ibsen, emotions tucked inside some secret pocket
of the mind's beaded purse whose velvet hills
chafe against a night snapped shut
on money and cheap cosmetics.
Doreen believes in science: that it's the model
for all reasonable inquiry and she dreams
that she must verify everything that has
inductive consequence.
Ned says if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck,
quacks like a duck, gets shot like a duck, it's a duck.
Derek's not sure. He's not sure of very much.
Hardly anything in fact, yet he cannot avoid
the letters of the alphabet and is in love with words.
Sara says he speaks the language of traps.
She wants to reveal the fallacious nature
of the entire world, blink out, in semaphore,
some weak beacon of history in whose light
she dances after a little wine and some good smoke.
Elegance in sunlight. Dream. There are no more
pirogis in the freezer and the hostility of the check-
out clerks at ShopRite would make an Apache seem docile.
The blonde nymph by the Tylenol reading Teen World
has the sweetest ass this side of paradise. She's
moving her lips. A surreal unintentional Muzak
karaoke marathon right here near the produce aisle
as the liver in the meat department gets dark with age.
~ . ~
My Father Said, Reading The News, "It's A Good Time To Be 90"
Barry Wallenstein
Anthony Lavalo weakening at 93—
Maxwell Neil gasping gently at 94—
Sandra Sue Little, smiling, is quiet now
as if practicing; Grandpa Mike—
great grandpa at last—
dozes through his medicine like comfort
and he doesn't mind the taste,
sometimes sour, sometimes very hot and bitter,
as all his days go down toward a natural end,
while the anxious young check for war news;
it's a race against the clock, for outside the windows,
there is a fallout from the sky
as if the sky—so blue one day, so famously
red and golden even on that same day—
had had enough:
Now there is a new smell rising from the streets
thick as lava,
while the old ones remember less and less.
Tony, Max, Sandra or Mike—
Will they leave in peace one by one
or huddle with multitudes in stadiums—
in the hearts of cities,
the unnatural zones of lost bearings?
The wizened ones seem indifferent;
the speed of their departure means everything
in this race against the greater fall.
~ . ~
The Dense Forest
Marc Widershein
I stir out of Plato's cave slowly as the half-light dawns.
There are no forest animals hidden in dens.
There are no creatures at all.
I grow with the silent roots of trees
until I am covered with bark.
I see the turquoise reflections off waters
perhaps as the trees do, but I am only one of their undulations.
I part the veil with hands that are mere extensions
of unfolding consciousness.
Enter the domain of the dense forest
where statuary stands at the gates
like martyred philosophers who have abated
the storm with reason.
Rivulets running before time,
there is some terrain to cross yet.
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