Rachel Mallino
( North Carolina )Patrick PfisterA Poet’s ToolsHe told me of her as if he were leaving church early, eager to pull his throat back out. She was fair-skinned, full gowned, braided hair. I once dreamt of her long legs wrapped around his like a wriggly octopus as I stood incapable - as always - when it comes to faith. Their union must have been so religious. Tongues as communion and in the end someone, probably him, the martyr. How cliché I think, which is my only salvation – a poet whose alphabet has so few letters, including the x, all stroked out and cross-eyed, telling me we need each other.
( Barcelona, Spain )MallorcaYachts as grand as empires moor reflections in emerald until twilight floods the realm and laps the shore sienna smooth. Wishbone needles prong desire, twirling down off coastal pines onto a terra cotta terrace where a mattress waits beneath a sundial. The gnomon lures darkness and a lion-heart prince on a one-night stand. In one swift eve summer flings fall into winter’s spring. Candle dinner of votive flame – kingdom come in passion’s domain. Dawn bids “adeu” and a majestic three-master weighs anchor: the sphinx departs, the reign remains.
accessory by Cheryl Dodds
( Taiwan )
Clare L. Martin, Two Poems
( Youngsville, Louisiana )Robert LietzBread MakingThe kitchen smokes with heads of fire. My body is a rolling wheel, a metallic song. Sweat pools in my arm pits, streams under and between my breasts. Shoulders churn. I knead the lump again, again. Wring my hands red. I am ghost-faced, pouring out tears. A faceless attacker, cold hate, cores my spine draws up my neck bone. The feeling, black as burnt butter, saturates my brain. This bread will be bitter. It will sour and harden those who eat it. They will shudder to call me mother.Garbage WomanI am a gallows tree. Bottle glass chicken bones jointed mannequins of milk jug plastic drowned oaks crab shells wind-struck birds seaweed, guts and eels hang. I am a body of water. The love letters you folded into paper boats, sail across my hips, burn to ash in faraway volcanoes. My palms weep with pearls.
( Ohio )Gary BeckCuyahoga SaturdayExcept for a sheltered few and slope-cresting pines the color's gone -- leaving this look nine years / three hours each way have taught me mean thanksgiving -- coming to you Elizabeth -- or driving from you weekdays two spend apart in two chilled houses. And this is the way a weekend finishes -- after the hours cutting brush / trimming the eight foot tangles of thorns and crimson berries -- discovering the bridge / the pond -- solid green in a dry summer -- but clearing now -- since it's November -- and getting us out in time -- to chainsaw -- to hurl or drag off loads -- filter a view to futures now -- to this serious jazz / hawk-pulse our evening company arranges -- these drinks and sandwiches -- these words we are getting better at -- shaping the afternoon toward dreams and dawns and lanes still manageable -- toward sweeps of last fall hues / of epiphanies or numbers we're unused to -- climbing or hiking up / across and down leaf-strewn steps and bridge-boards -- sharing the light Elizabeth / the beet-hued copper / crimson and gold-toned woods around -- leaning / shouldering across and over creek flow -- carrying the lenses / bodies / the memory in vest pockets -- with processing to come -- and zoom -- why not? -- maybe another weekend left -- of Ohio bow-season and fall photos -- for which we must speak responsibly -- for these nine ( nearly ) years -- with summer breaks to tease the sense of being married -- with miles between and toward -- schooled by moments love -- by these leaves and leaf-formed light / by gravity-minding stone and sky-shared water -- where the blues lie out -- and light and sheep and chimney-smudges speaking season -- reasons to be out-doors -- why not? -- and zoom -- why not? -- these synergies-stirred hues -- this doowop redux -- why not? -- and so much sound as two -- so well in love -- would well believe in.
( New York, New York )Melissa BuckheitWandererThough I wander through my land despised and shunned, I never lived Long Island dreams, wealthy and secure. I wanted a Pacific sunset, the mad-painted sky, visionary cities. I have lost the sunrise song in the desert of nuclear waste, the untrod path of inner fears, subterranean desires never spoken in the roadside pause. The long, searing summer ache sucking the juices from the land, myself migratory, a tongueless poet, a churchless prophet.
( Tucson, Arizona )As If I Were Conceived In Her Diorama
1
i the daughter face a window outside this house. if you place a chair a foot behind the panes, the audience will see me, unmoving, the lip of the stage a parallel line to their bodies troused in yellow light. each leg an isosceles through the endpoint to the midpoint. the very back of my head, soft spot in skulls of infants, is the vanishing point
2
she is my mother’s sister. when her head appears, the brain merges green squares of light in the circuits and neurotransmitters. face as blank as green glass or my own i never know. the green words for the frame bury the distinction of bodies. if i am angry it is because someone has dialed my number: juniper, goggles, bladder-wrack, bottles, laminaria frame the blackness of a room where the frame is a black perimeter indistinguishable from the room
3
sometimes you call up someone else’s aphasia, a taste like raw silk in the mouth, several ideas of yourself consuming the clothes worn all summer—linen pants and coats, capris and shells, shell button-down shirts and side-slit skirts. then to crouch in the box of green light, nude, letting the shutter’s eye lick the light of my torso; curves conjugated guttural sounds
4
i whose daughter of a man whose words i do not hear fall behind the parallel lines intersecting our bodies’ frames. drive in the car stage left, no dialogue for movement. on the couch center as he focuses on some point in the rafters, what Stanislavsky taught, empathizing with some spectacular childhood trauma or tv. i am perpendicular to him and that lighted box of energy whose particles disperse his eyes, a wavelength i cannot seem. i not the daughter to a man crying under the kitchen table in shell shock, who rapes my aunt in his bed, a square almost-windowless room, 10 feet down the hall
5
the afterimage of the bulb on the eye is really the eye itself, accretive cone a mirror through relation on the far side of the box. the bulb is a dead white hiding blue glass holding dead white the waves emanate through. cone of heat enters my pelvis, red clementine of capillaries, cage from spectrum, slice gone out. spiraling of ribs, heart religion to the bulb of the eye obliterated by blood
6
sometimes you call up your own aphasia. a square of window sluiced with water. you can see reflection in the floor – to sleep in the supply cabinet or under library tables, reading the words of novels taken from their original language across a bridge of throats not yet cut by knives, willful destruction of her texts
7
bits of statuary plowed up in a field, carbon-made objects collected and assembled to exhibit circular patterns in large public spaces, mildew in pipes and bath-drains, a green gel photographed in the dark over a frame with a spotlight behind the body as the horizon, the waves of Odysseus’ black curls, the Desert Sidewinding Adder, photosensitive plants and native chameleons indistinguishable from habitat, how the ocean begins, Sappho’s dewy syllables