POEMS of NINE POETS
(Summer 2015, Volume 3)
(Summer 2015, Volume 3)
George Stratigakis
The Hill That Slants The hill that slants through half the window Like a schism holds my soul beside. Lowly needle shrubs cling to fallow fields While wisps of clouds faint and white above Hold hope of other more forgiving worlds. “This Saturday will be six months Since my husband passed away. You’ll come…I’ll make memorial wheat and You’ll see my son that you’ve not seen The one you went to school together.” Houses of stone built long ago by hand Bend towards earth from where they came; Roofs have tumbled through gaping holes Letting loose the souls and lives held near By daughters that learned their lessons well. Here wine once was raised to toast life-posts Where beams and tiles in jagged piles lie. She’s kept her home, a garden, a few hens, The flagstones whitewashed--her ten yards around-- As she has done for seven decades now. Today the amaranths brown with thirst For twisted in her bath prone she lies While for a month she programmatized With memory wheat to eulogize To bring together bits of lives gone by. A few cicadas call…but many less I think; Lone neighbors crack their doors and venture out To run through the ritual they all await. A light breeze flutters over hills and town And as always, the sky is blue. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Kika Dorsey
Ascent I am pushing the wheelchair up the steep hill, asphalt black and pine framing the road, rust-colored boulders and pockets of snow, and I sweat in the cold of this spring thaw, while my mother stares ahead with the eyes of an insect, those compound eyes seeing mosaics, where I have no name or color, and her thin legs dangle off the chair like the scarves of women dancing. I am the dance, the daughter of light, while my mother grows thinner, yet still her weight presses on my legs that struggle to climb, and I breathe heavily as I see the finish line, with no prizes or flags or crowd to greet me, just the pinnacle of a mountain, thin air like the sparse words I speak to her, where the view will greet me, where I will look down at the angled grid of a city and the maples still bare of green and cars crawling, and a little girl as tiny as the grain of a star, falling. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Tulip Chowdhury
Captive Shadow My shadow hovers over brown earth; captive of mind body and heart, memory wings fly to last spring, back and forth back and forth wondering, when spring will come and my shadow will find purple crocus again. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Allison Grayhurst
Quagmire . Coming down, knowing now that everything known is blindness, deciphered speculation – constellations out there that spin, conjoin, burst and create are mesmerizing but lifeless – into the future, out from the past – the power is menacing, somewhat, and somewhat stale, stagnant, just ‘happening’ like storms happen and the rising of the moon. Rain on a leaf or an orange tabby chasing a shadow is accessible, pleasantly startling, metaphysically invasive. Many serious intellects are left crawling from the lack of sleep, from acquiring too many codes and smug victories. We are small, inside this body of God – a city, drooling with arrogance and inquisitiveness. That is us in motion, devouring the zenith and charting out mysteries. But things get caught on other things. Dead butterflies can still glow – behind clean glass, inside Berber-carpeted buildings, all fluorescent lights and classifications. We can point and name and even think that energy starts and ends, forget that everything is circulation and that life here is simple: It would rather copulate, raise offspring, than count stars. Inside this body of God, we are cupped in fluid boundaries, by instinct, by undeniable emotion, stronger, yet part of, cerebral musings. We feed from the Earth and we get hungry. We have these telescopes, our catacombs of understanding, but we also have pilgrimage, crust, heartbeat, dying, soccer fields and song. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Cory Howell
An Enemy Neoscona crucifera. Hiding away, silent, still. Your woven traps loom above my door. I wish you dead, yet I know your worth. You watch over my dusty doorway, Charon keeping Styx and flickered dead Scraping toward the light inside. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Geoffrey Heptonstall
Maggi Hambling's Walls of Water The painting of water in motion Is the sound of a thinking mind, The sensuality of silence And the rising of earth into heaven. Another idea of order perhaps With a critical whisper On the gallery wall As nature changes course. The eye that sees the water Is the hand that feels the motion In the mind that speaks Of eternity all the time. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Woodrow Hightower
Bleeding Empathy Yes I heard about the fake jewels and the Lois Lane splash down But why the tears Baby? If the worst thing you’ve done is trigger satellite surveillance and foreign provocation by zig-zagging past the metal detector at the gate to the Mount of Olives then what’s the problem? Listen to me Kamikaze sand surfing wearing beatbox headphones and riding a solar-powered tricycle dressed like Isadora Duncan listening to Tchaikovsky’s Romance in F Minor for Piano is not a crime is it?...Well is it? Trust me Baby Everything will be all right. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
James G. Piatt
Country Road As I drove down the rutted dusty road, I noticed rows of corn fading into the Raspberry dusk, green epitaphs to weary farmers of the dark earth, unholy stalks guarded by enigmatic scarecrows of ambiguous character, staring with button eyes at the blackness of the sky overflowing with hungry crows. The old dirt road, vanishing into the far horizon, miles, and miles of tedious flatness…leads to an obscure monotony, and ends in a cacophony of comfortable silence where two elderly people watch ancient movies on an antique VCR, attached to an old RCA television set. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Ken W. Simpson
The Genes of a Poker Machine Prototypes of sophisticated software evolved into mechanical mutations designed to fleece the vulnerable with regressive genes flashing lights and man-made brains. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |