Wild Horses, Badlands, South Dakota by Doug Beasley
( St. Paul, Minnesota )
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Ann White, Two Poems
( Florida )David KrumpLike WindThe shy cat runs across the roof hiding her whereabouts. Arias of mourning dove converse with a fallen leaf. Thursday, we sat and heard the neighbor’s sprinkler. Persistent and gentle, determined as rain. I cup your knuckles in my palm and bring them to my mouth, kissing the tamed hand while you speak of sago palms. Such things seem one-sided: my movement, your stillness. But this is how we reciprocate. The tree graceful under the wind.You Are Right AgainThe chartreuse shoulders of the hosta push up and shake off their load of dirt in second year vigor. It’s just as you said. Three of them bump against my calla lilies. Three of them to show me I planted in haste. This is how it is: I am all forward and red, the doubt that dismisses. I am vacant wind that hurries the scrap across pavement. Those bright annuals - how they must worry - their multicolor shouts against short life. But the perennials: “Waiting is hard work,” they might say or “It all comes to naught.” The skeptic questions the soil, the volume of rainfall, the meaning of cloud formations, the strength of sun. Look at you - ear down to the noiseless passage of clues. No questions come buzzing. Nothing to ruin clean thought. There are ravens and there are vultures. From above they look the same: shades stretched across the sun. I stare, crane my neck, hypothesize. I could faint from the portents. You are napping on a hammock in the sun, which is scissored one moment by a stretch of black wing.( Wisconsin )Dorothee Langthe devil nigh tooThe safe place to begin is the end. So they all merrily merrily ever after. Prior the peace came war. The bodies were rotting peacefully, then the bullets fled them and shattered shells reformed in the battlefield, leapt up, returning to canon (home). Everybody charged in reverse, back to safety of respective trenches. It is now one minute until zero hour and PFC Lafleur is biting his lip, simmering his last thoughts. (no one could ever take lightly notion of assassination) (correction: somewhere in all this: Jesus : cross : Socrates : hemlock) Nero is eyeing up his fiddle. The buffalo flesh is being purposed. We love you: here’s a big wooden horse. There is a completely different silence until Baby Kahn breaks his first playmate’s bone, smiles, arrives his fate. The oceans have risen to forfeit the last breath of unicorn. Dandelions arrive on earth. Dispatched from mothership of origin, the fuzzy platoons parachute tumbling into shallow soil, the color yellow is born. No one fears rain. Everyone fears rain. Rain is an unknown variable. Everything is in the ocean. The ocean is in everything. Call him Ishmael. Dinosaur: Roar. Man: Ug, Ug, Bakka Bakka. The new catastrophe in the garden. (nothing contrasts without the apple) Archangels are screaming, trumping but it is the seventh day. God is sound asleep. (It is still the seventh day) : man : beasts : sky : land : idea of light : formlessness : a bang : a void . . .( Germany )Lee Passarella, Three PoemsTonos IntensasThe colors of time Are visions of legends of The perfect beach Is transparency Cuando el cielo Se uno Con el mar Intense Intensions Are la luna de dia Is the ultimate fantasy To experience The fragrance Lift here
( Lawrenceville, Georgia )Ruth DaigonDead LettersA “skiff” of snow, we used to call this brittle shell that coats the handle of the Lenten rose’s parasol of green. With dictionaries mum about it, the word to me was connotation only: thin sheet glazed hard like the cluster s & k, prow of that ship-like word itself. But here, in my Georgia garden, there’s tougher still—these purple buds that crane on fat birds’ necks, making hungry Lent tumescent. By noon, the ship will have set sail, my gelid rose turned a nest of purple beaks, open shyly upside down. I think of houses now, how words propel or haunt them. I’m a snowbird flown the coop for good. My father’s house is boarded up this February, the Pennsylvania snow thick against the shutters that echo with the long-stilled words: skiff glakèd smearcase shirtwaist box.AccommodationSomebody loves us all.—Elizabeth Bishop, “The Filling Station”Somebody has proffered to us these thousand wild nosegays in shocking pink, a meadowfull of them. Coffee-shop art, all the more garish for its tastefully rendered highlights in old gold, its plain frame of slate-gray. Severe: the colors of wet clouds and autumn drought. The tall grass nods pale heads, wise with seed. It’s a ham-handed gesture, really, like those sugarcoated putti seen in Old Masters: fat fish that ply the air like waves, fatly caressing the pink fringe of cloud the Madonna sails through— always with a grin. Well-fed, constant as remoras, how they shadow the grim-faced saint! or the monumental and perfected Savior swimming His way across the white empyrean.Jardin des MusesTho’ much is taken, much abides….—Tennyson, “Ulysses”
1.This has been a March more like June—days in the mid-70s, the primrose lolling parched tongues over the mulch at the back of the house. The first trees to bloom—okames, star magnolias—caught in the mangle look limp at close quarters, the white stars pulpy on the branch, the pink globes of blossom grizzled and frayed. But across the highway, among the hair and bones of last year’s witch grass, they’re an improbable paint-ball splat of color, a child’s artwork.2.How we labored over it, dipping the hunks of sponge in watercolor, bent to our task like jewelers. Tamping the butcher paper up and down with the pink and purple blotches, calling it spring.3.Toward the end, Renoir painted with his hands tied to his brushes, sapped and burled with pain: Odysseus lashed to the mast, to his need to know the sweetness of their distant song— O blessed minefield, blessed lost-with-all-hands.( California )Mouthing SecretsSince I have learned not to kill them things have been easier Though I prefer my ghosts to inhabit the dark if they come by day I'll leave all the doors open I watch them mouthing secrets smiling as if there were two heavens I recall simple equations in the heart's circumference each sum exquisitely fixed in my memory Women in sweet and sudden rages for fear the future comes when they're not looking Children claustrophobic in their skins fanning out like fish bones Younglings piercing love's delicate membrane to taste the fleshy core Friends in the gray solfeggio of autumn and the ritual smile Together with them, the seeded hours pass until a spill of sun, a sweep of shade and under the ashen stars my dead are growing old
II - Sleep Screen With Lavish Proportions
III - Defining Borders
IV - Bodies in the Rain
Featured Poet - Rebecca Loudon
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Current Issue - Summer 2004
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