POEMS of SEVEN POETS
(Spring 2016, Volume 4)
(Spring 2016, Volume 4)
Kika Dorsey
Between You and Me Between you and me lie snow-covered alleys with footprints of cats and frozen dust. I walked those alleys as a child, peeked into backyards and a house where an old woman cooked on a silver stove. Between you and me is always a child, and you comb her hair, and she wears a yellow dress and hangs a blue bulb on our Christmas tree. I have traversed the alley between you and me, stomped my feet in the snow, wondering where the old woman’s children went, wondering how I can find you to tell you about the child, how you can’t let her go. Between you and me lies the ache of labor. After our daughter was born, you caught my blood and threw it across the plains, and from it rose yucca, its flowers as white as the hospital walls that lay between you and me until I stopped bleeding. And I did. Now the cats are always hunting and the snow is too frozen to build the dragon you always sculpted for us. Branches lie etched in the white sky, and we sit in the hot tub, daughter dunking head in warm water, and you say, Look, look how they’re always reaching, and I look up at their web and how they finger the clouds and I wonder what the old woman was cooking, fried catfish or a red stew of potatoes and thyme, and I wonder if she’s still alive, and I see that what lies between you and me has frozen roots and its branches are the children rising over snow-covered alleys that lie between you and me. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Eugene Goldin
Bad Billy Bad Billy’s world went by that-a-way running down the street like a sheet of rain head down in the night while counting other people’s money from an early retirement convenient diagnosis with a nasty secret covered in the old barn out back. I heard that he was last seen cursing the excesses of comfort from his crouched throne. Billie was fond of taking childhoods away, stealing the neighbor’s cat and running naked in the middle of the night through the backyards of the old neighborhood. He was always chasing the muse around a mulberry bush, but really just breaking his own heart again and again putting salt on everything. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Charles Farrell Thielman
The Borders of Rust and Repair Those who listen for the sound of ash say fire is an animal that grows by drinking the sap of wood and bone and speaks in guttural continuo, gold on yellow waves scored over black char. Embers taken by wind scribe the intent to crown every need for rebirth with a given fact of darkness, that exile pulled back overnight through borders the moon traces. Guarding hope in white light dilutes the magical, coyote not heard singing the code to unlock all gates and drop flints up moon-lit paths, wings stacked on a bone-dry slope. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Elisabeth Sharber
Package for Coretta It was faint, but it was enough, an eight-second low-fi gruff planked on the floor like a push-up. She played it until she thought she knew and slid the box, the size of a bomb under the table. What sandpaper tsunamis did she swallow back down for safety, for her sisters, for the weight of Alabama pressed into Sunday heels marching, and now the weight of Martin. She would walk through love’s shrapnel in a footnote no one would see and wait for the dust to settle. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Donal Mahoney
The Lovely Women of My Life If I met the same women now I probably wouldn't know them. They're missing teeth, I bet, and have gray Medusa hair. Their eyes no longer dance, I'm sure, and they have liver spots everywhere. They likely wobble in their flats and haven't worn heels since adding fifty pounds. Some of them, I'm certain, wouldn't recognize me, either, despite thick spectacles. They can't recall the picnics we enjoyed with wine and caviar under oak trees in Grant Park, never mind the nights that followed. Who needs a woman that forgetful? I need a younger woman now, someone I can finally marry, a girl with a figure like Monroe, Hepburn's eyes and Hayworth's hair, someone lithe, slim and graceful, someone strong enough to push my wheelchair up the ramp. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Krikor Der Hohannesian
Araneus Diadematus As if by nature’s sorcery, back-lighted by an orange harvest moon, the alchemy of spinnerets - protein into silk, gossamer suspended between eave and gutter at the whim of a puff of wind or the weight of raindrops, a sparrow’s hunger. In the morning, droplets of dew hung by night’s mist diadem the filaments, lustered by low shafts of sunrise, elegance to rob the breath. Each night a prayer for its survival. Like matins and vespers added to a diurnal ritual, a treasure of communion, of serenity, nothing asked in return. Seven days it defied wind, rain and predator, a damselfly or two sustenance enough. Then, whisked away on the stealthy wings of the first light frost. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Woodrow Hightower
Here To There Between stops In and out of sleep Buttoned up stem to stern The call girls are wasted And a straw-haired kid Skates through Central Park When the anchor drops We’ll slam a dram And talk about pipedreams And ceremony And the night the Beatles Burned Mississippi down Your backbone is twisted My legs are melting And the celebrity gods Watch us from 30,000 feet Blow us kisses And call it good The trick is to travel light A suitcase full of grapefruit A head full of ragtag Can you tell me the time? I think I’m on the threshold Of something small Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |