POEMS of NINE POETS
(Winter 2015-2016, Volume 3)
(Winter 2015-2016, Volume 3)
Jae Rossi
Antebellum Before the war, we traversed the Mason-Dixon line to introduce me to my partner’s in-laws. Flat hours yawned like days the further south we got from New York to Maryland. How did you end up here, married? I followed a boy. We wanted a nice family, a simple life… I’m still here. After school they came, from condos or cul-de-sacs to pray where scooters dangled from a tree by foam-covered handles, aluminum decks luminous in dusk before the porch lights tripped on. At a down-home picnic by the crick they served meadow-tea so syrupy the bees came to take a dip, I sipped and they stared. How’s your family now? Your brother? Joey’s twenty-one and drinking alcohol! Lord have mercy. Well you tell him Mrs Foster says to stay away from that stuff. Yes’m I surely will, you take care now. I trod softly through the morass, I did not anticipate imbroglios, our love would not survive the year. back then I played along. A rocking chair fueled their bonfire its soft wrinkled wood licked up by the flames. no electronics allowed so kids played each other, miming, their muddy limbs chasing the dark. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Doug Bolling
Being There This shore. This peel of sand and age old wrack crouching there as sea beasts might just up from the tide. To walk here is to feel yourself stripped clean of the masks you wore far inland where they held your name and soul in a vise and tightened, tightened. The sea gulls patrol the sky like angels loosened from all doctrine and rule. They swoop over you close, closer daring a challenge or even an eye raised in anger. You wanted to discover yourself, the real you, you told them back there where borders and straight lines decided things. And so you may. 0r not. The ocean rising now to moon’s long arm. The earth at your feet already turning to slosh and spume and you the sojourner bent on catching yourself just at the point where many and one meet to decide, strange journey through the mirror and beyond. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
John Davis Jr.
These Pens can be Refilled states blue paper taped to the top of a thin wooden Cuesta Rey box loaded with push-button plastic ballpoints lifted from twentieth-century insurance companies, gas stations and banks my great uncle served on his sales route. He is dead, and has left me his office supplies laden with frugal, practical words scrawled under paperweights and in desk drawers. A Great Depression veteran, he knew true values of ink, work and memory. Click-clicking each pen, I find them dry. Their inner springs scratch for release, relief. It’s a small enough token – picking up new parts for old habits, adding in simple, temporary fixes that yield preservation and permanence. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Catherine Harnett
Winter, Still Bird-dark air, ravenous with caws, morning and dusk, of crows; wings sleek black against sky's steel palette, the fact of it: the clap and stark of it—winter’s ashen landscape, this Lenten pall. Feigned spring, another early thaw teases, reminds me of the bank-bound streams we once walked along, reminds me of that mild Lenten day when I succumbed to you: who promised it was real; would last; ardor. False spring: how foolish to shed my coat so soon Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Kerryanne A. Bell
My Daddy Sings Weeping in vain, on the moving shoulders of men, temporary kisses and widowed promises, drowning into decades of sin and cigarettes, Between birth and death, happiness, and all that fails, yet today, my daddy sings. His song is brief, a silence so loud that nations hear His song is black and celebrated. He is tropical and amid daughters of heaven and earth and I am established in his lyric. Muse after muse, poetic agony and depression, he stretches for me and I hear his song. Sing daddy, Tell Barbados that you love me, tell America that I am not lost You never forgot me. You know my beginning and where I lay. You rescue me, when I am forgotten, amid those empty shoulders of moving men and cussing mothers who borne sisters and brothers of youth and un-forgiveness. You are my muse. My coo-coo and flying fish. My Caribbean, West Indian dream, and I weep for you As you sing, our song... Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Michelle Brooks
Flavor of the Month If I were tears, I’d be the kind no one ever saw and that provided little comfort. If I were a movie, I’d be a gritty realistic dark comedy that few ever saw, but to whom some had a slavish devotion. If I were a flavor of ice-cream, I’d be Rocky Road, something cheap and store-bought, that no one wanted to admit they enjoyed. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Micaela Donabella
Abstract Art With you The lines were squiggled, Scribbled, And undefined. Making a mess was fun for a while, Until there was no room left on the page. And they began to ask what I’d intended to make, And I had no answer. And the direction of my lines was different than yours. So I panicked And erased-- Furiously, Vigorously. I left you there. Still with a pencil, But no paper to create. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Michael Mira
Jane Street I walked through Jane Street and saw the white buck-toothed smile of hookers wearing mini-skirts and it reminded me of the white piano keys when I played sad sad sonatas. Streetlamp light reflect off tinted windows as I listen to the creaking sound of a car swaying side to side, like a boat in hostile Atlantic waters the night a fisherman committed suicide. I passed through 10th Avenue, on the corner of Hillman Street, and saw men negotiating with a girl who didn’t speak English but could understand dollar signs. Bodies tremble in the winter night, only to find warmth in a cheap motel called Heartbreak, with the "t" on the neon sign busted, and I reply, Yes, I can hear them break-- into a thousand pieces. And they say that's why you end up on this road, because even though your empty gin bottle led you to cheap sex, in truth, you're just looking for meaning in your life. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |
Linda Wojtowick
Personal Ensign We left Cape Disappointment on a Sunday with a cobbled zeal, smelling that last night’s aspirations from a rocky fire. The jagged shore fell away and the crew began to sing. Their mouths opened and gulls came. Mournful, and unexpected, since they were leaving what was a known cursed place on that day of their Lord. But they are young and stinking and prone to song. No storms now, no rain. My ship had a name once but I’ve forgotten it. Willfully, of course. It was something biblical, a woman with fins. Tonight, though the damp ropes swell and teem, our sails make a decent show, flapping leavened, bone-colored, against curdled stars. I cannot soothe the screaming child-hearts of my men. Big fish rip like tired cloth in their oversized, fatherless hands. I’ve come to hate the sea, its devouring salt. The endless flat horizon of it under the fatty sky. My flag’s crest has leeched out in punishing sun, beaten to a silk by wind. I keep dreaming of the desert, of shifting weals of sand. Of the rock and blessed heat. Out there, just a glimpse of wetness would have value, have possibility. The ring of a dream pond up ahead. Of late I am chiefly concerned with oasis, and rumors of oasis. Biographical information, favorite public domain poem. |