riven poetry journal 2 and 3

Riven 2

contributors

John Amen, Jim Boring, Terri Brown-Davidson, FEATURED POET:Leonard Cirino, Jason Fraley, Taylor Graham, John Grey, Marilyn Johnston, Erin Keane, Igor Kruchik, Alison Easterly, Michael P. McManus, eirck mertz, Dean Metcalf, Judith H. Montgomery, Nic Nigro, Joyce Odam, Mary C. O'Malley, Kathryn Rantala, Lois Rosen, C. J. Sage, Lisa Seed, Scott T. Starbuck, Charles Thielman, S.A. Thieman, Cyril Wong, William Woolfitt

Featured Poet:
Leonard Cirino
1 statement/7 poems

State of the Arts Address

With the onset of the industrial age in the late 19th century poetry began to become more commonplace, and to lose its musical qualities by the early 20th century. Although several great lyric poets emerged toward the end of the 1800's (among them Gerald Manly Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, and Emily Dickinson), since then there have been fewer and fewer who even attempt to replace them. The reasons for this could be the overall shift of the population centers from the rural to the urban and the ensuing loss of affinity to the the natural world; the dehumanization of people in the less rewarding and more physically and emotionally taxing factory work; the homogenization of phrases, idioms, and speech patterns due to the general dispora of ethnic minorities who used original language related to their specific geographical areas; and, a breakdown of many types of religious ceremonies during which people sang in choirs, and hence, gained, in their early years, the metaphors and rhythms of older hymns.

There are only two examples of African-American poets in the early twentieth century that come to mind who were able to write in a Southern Black idiom and still gain recognition. The better known is Langston Hughes, a Harlem Renaissance poet, who, even in his most colloquial verse, spoke eloquently of the inner city. The other was Sterling A. Brown whose reputaion has not maintained a following among the literati of the US the second half of this century, but who is receiving attention in the Black Literature classes in the Universities. Their poetry, in the idoms of their people, is of the most purely melodic and meaningful verse. In more modern times the works of Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks are examples of ethnic poets who use speech usually considered out of fashion or in poor taste, but with the true music of their peers. Currently, the poet Patricia A. Smith, who was born in the south side of Chicago, and now resides in Boston, catches many of the contemporary themes of modern Blacks as well as the inflections of the people whose voices she writes in.

Also, at the present time, there is Spanish and English mixed in the same poems (called Spanglese). I'm not familiar with the practioners of this bilingual verse, but, the book, AKRILICA, by Juan Felipe Herrera, is a fine example of this relatively new form in that his poems are not only musical in both language, but also because he as important things to say about the world of Hispanics and the culture of the nortes.

To reach even further into my position, without much foundation except a general skepticism, it seems that much recent North American poetry has not only lost its musical qualities, but it has devolved into an aesthetic of simplicity and quick takes -- because most of my generation was, at an early age, under the influence of TV. To make it worse, now there is an entire generation of young poets who were raised on computers and narcissism. Leading the the way for these poets are the deconstructionists who have tried to destroy language, and their ensuing poetic counterparts, the L*A*N*G*U*A*G*E school, both of whom have decided to market the notion of language in a material way after the manner of a horribly distorted view of Derrida's aesthetics. Along with them, but in an opposing simplistic poetics, goes the sentimentality of the Iowa School of Poets who has been described by one critic as the "Doily School". In my opinion these so-called poets are responsible for the los of idiomatic speech, originality of thought, and the corruption of poetry into sound bytes. They don't speak with intelligence or originality, but only with mouth confusion. It's as if the corporate mentality of buy and sell has somehow replaced the world of art with dishonesty. The fact that many academics (such as Jorie Graham and others) have become purveyors of these ideas, is not only appaling, but reminds me of a mass hysteria to join the crowd, to be part of this debasing force simply because it is modern or trendy. One thing is sure, these schools have total disregard for beauty, not to mention common sense. Perhaps this is a reaction to the uglification of the world and its universal dangers.

As an editor, I receive at least 15 manuscripts a year from obscure and unpublished (in book form) poets who are worthy of a much wider audience. And generally, on reading the prize and award winning books of the year, including both the academics and the street poets, in most cases I find very little of an aesthetic value and an even greater lack of dimension to the writers' thinking, much less the ability to communicate beyond a meager substance.

The state of the Union of poetry has come under close scrutiny in past years and most critics complain about the workshop poem. I agree, but also believe it has as much to do with the lack of roots of poets in particular and the population in general, as well as the mass confusion and violence in the world today, which leads people to undervalue a true voice and in many cases not even be able to hear one because of the fast-food like commodity poetry has become.

Unless a poet has that rare youthful genius like Rimbaud or Baudelaire, or maybe even W.S. Merwin if he is to be given adequate consideration, it takes dozens of adult years to study, refine, and put to practice the art of poetry. I'm not speaking of the anemic, talky academic (lack of) work, or the in your face poems that make up a great portion of what I read in today's chapbooks and 'zines.
I'm talking about poets who have seriously considered the centuries of previous work, both in their own language and translation, and who use this work as a stepping stone to modern art that is still universal in quality. It is not a task one learns in a year or five: it is a life-long discpline. Today's poets who espouse so much Ezra Pound should go back and digest his ABC of Reading. I have become tired of the glossy and highly touted books univerities, and presses like Graywolf and Copper Canyon, as well as the whole slimy and self-centered 'zine scene poets. I'm not even sure I want to read more contemporary work from the United States. My choice today is to return to the Asian classics, the Greeks and Latins, troubadours like Villon, and many of the early to mid-twentieth century southern and eastern European poets.

Even though I read these only in translation they speak to me in more qualitative and musical ways than almost anything written in the US tday does. It is a sad state in my artistic life when I have to return to poets of the past rather than choose something contemporary, but it has become more and more often true.

Lost Reality

after Michael Hamburger
homage Chagall

The lovers spin like folded bats.
Kissing air, they hang from limbs
Like acrobats who fling outward
And then decline, caught amid
The grass, transformed to soil
On the fervent meadow,
A moon inscribes the bodies.
The mad and lovely earth
Describes and abstracts the shadows
Of trees, the doubled lovers
Lifting off the ground, embracing wind
While talking with the ghosts of cows,
Fluttering over steeples, towers,
Barns, and houses lit with yellow
Rooms, while the downward wings
Slow and falter, build on the reverse
Implosion of the just just-married couple
Dancing to a violin, playing
In the penumbra of a singing lamb.

Leonard Cirino
Springfield, OR

As if Pain Doesn't Hurt

after Miguel Hernandez

It's certain an exquisite knife that eats flesh
Forms my life-guiding blight on the landscape,
The distinct smells and obscenities, as when
Stamens stick out their tongues stiff as a hard on.

I'm certain it's not about beauty or heaven,
More, a trapeze act balanced as if the artist
Curved his spine and flung the essence of terror -

The ground is axed, her body flushes:
Her heart now my mouth, ultimate, uttering.

Leonard Cirino
Springfield, OR

Why I Should Stay Mute
for Jeri

At tmes I have nothing to say to you
And rest my head on your breast,
Touching the very crest of fortune,
Milking what we've had and chosen,
Asking, without a word or thought,
About the things we've decided
And those that have been decided for us.

I know you weren't looking for love
So I called out that I was lost
And the search began: to bring the weight
Of stone to my demented mind, to grasp
Fingers in the shining light of solid air,
Turn the sounds of lambs back to where
Each one saw the other in a shepherd.

At your breast I hear my body
Remind you that all men lie.
But there are no words to say
I trust you like I do the work
Of God - which I know is real
When I rush over the hills of your flesh,
Arrive at a stream, and touch the water
As a madman would his lover's heart.

Leonard Cirino
Springfield, OR

The Axeman

after Siktanc

Some evil things make us grip our hands
In prayer. Then they jump our bones
And breathe hard into the receiver
We hold trying to call for help.
But the room stinks and the rafters buckle
Under the weight of our devils.

The whole place reeks of dust:
The windows covered with mold
And our palms crisscrossed in worship.

Somewhere out toward the barn
A stranger picks up an ax and advances.
He strikes and the door splinters
Like a gunshot to the temple.

Fright tears our souls from our bodies.
He steps ino the kitchen,
Scans the counters and shelves.
His feet plunge into the next room
Where we huddle around our children.

The axeman strides forward
Holding the tool with both hands
And smashes the TV, the phone.

We struggle, then agree to his terms,
Content with the drama that turns us
Inside out. Like gloves removed
From our hands, we end up hanging
From the clothesline of the other world.

Leonard Cirino
Springfield, OR

A Blue Round

after Wallace Stevens

The wind comes strong in blue rounds
Unlike summer which is a dreamer's world,
Or autumn, which turns frosty and scolds
The ice that cracks out its wounds.

Therefore, the supreme realist sings of rain
And the scorn that arrives in winter
With the few-bird overcast weather
And blue birds going insane,

But, oh, the trees are vascular,
Mud is mired, the air
Whips the earth, limbs become bare,
The naked roots turn muscular.

The soil cries out its ardor
While bears birth beyond any order.

Leonard Cirino
Springfield, OR

Little Fucking Beggars

He throws the birds out of his yard -
Little fucking beggars - all they want
Is rice and corn and he doesn't have enough
For his children, much less himself -

A different kind of beggar whose feet
And legs are gone to war, he sits
On the corner, in a chair, but can't
Stand to give thanks for his alms.

When he can, he drinks whisky.
But cheap wine will do,
And once in a while he'll choke
Down a light beer.

When the day ends with a lost sun
He wheels his way home, the pines swing
Back and salute him, the earth tilts sharply,
And he becomes the angel of dark solitude.

Leonard Cirino
Springfield, OR

Lovely in the Bones

He talks like a man dead in the forehead.
A soldier, loving part of the past,
And hating the parts in the clouds,
He arrives at the horizon unkempt
And bearded with the feathers of a loon.

His shape is wounded like a hill in combat,
His chest sinks to his waist with age.
Before his eyes the sky becomes a dove,
And he laughs like the sea turned wild,
Biting the sand. The moon looks past
And watches it drown. Dawn,
Lovely as the bones of a delicate fish,
Burns like the stars, cooing on waves.

Leonard Cirino
Springfield, OR

Sweet Aphrodite on a Bicycle

Drag your raggy ruffles
through the puddled gutter.
The gauzy tulle night wraps
over the French Quarter. It's never

quite dark, is it? Neon trashy
divas glow in doorways
and I wait in the corner
of this tiny decaying bar. You

cycle slowly through the window's
phantom lip smears. The low
clouds move faster than your legs
can pump. Over the slick

cobblestones, untied corset
ribbons brush the lamppost
and you're gone, mouthing couplets
into a fog. I close my eyes, inhale

your passing scent: bougainvillea
and mildew. By the river, a trumpet
sings, muted. Pocket change
rings the bottom of this coffee can.

Erin Keane
Louisville, Kentucky
keane@sensilla.com

NO

Yes, I mean,
No.
I agree, to not disagree

-- make concessions,
smile
to be safe.

But
inside
I am dangerous.

I take my secret pencil
and scrawl a loud
reverberating NO!

on the wall
to be read by you
while I turn away

and pour hot tears
into the soup
I stir so carefully.

No.
Yes.
I am dangerous

Joyce Odam
Sacramento, CA

TODAY IS NOT THE DAY

Today is not the day for luck.
For rage, perhaps;
for staring at the rain.

But today has come too swiftly,
on borrowed news, with static
and wet shoes.

And with today comes
those two proper sisters,
Grim and Lonely,

who sit
on my two chairs. I feed them
whiskey and dirty blues.

They blur and whisper.
The man I am holding
is half unholy -

the half I'm telling -
the other half
is heavy with mute clues.

Today is not
the day I choose
for dim remember.

The sisters are sleeping now:
I follow
the secret smile and meaning.

Joyce Odam
Sacramento, CA

ARDOR

I was never the one they saw
they passed right through me

leaving rough impressions
I was always the one absorbed by light

they thought I was a window
birds broke against me and I grieved

rain knew me
and we wept together -- glistening

Joyce Odam
Sacramento, CA

chant
number three in a series for alice

your roman nose
and eyes flashing emerald
the broad smile
an aisle for teeth
wearing crowns
marks from the kessell bloodline

one mountain man
two gladiators
medicine stones and deer jerky
garnet lipped babies
to draw runes and string the beads
long after your womb ran dry

you signed your name with a bone
dipped in indigo
lit the pipe and smoked
your dreams set with the sun
a baby cried at the breast of night

S.A. Thieman

paper lure

the engraved biceps were invitations
to a dance i missed
but no longer knew steps to
had shoes for

i returned home
to your book
left open on the night stand
an island orchid blooming
long beyond season

S.A. Thieman

Black Night, Likely Stars

Out there, the screech owl could be love's answer
to despair as it perches on its limb,
and screeches the only ode

it knows. Tell me, who listens
to this? Yesterday, I killed a field mouse
by striking it on the head

with a sharp blow from my shovel.
And, I swear that the tiny soul on its release,
streamed skyward before my eyes

like an orb of light freed
at last from its earth-bound pi�ata.

I buried that shovel and danced
near the compost pile for John the Apostle.
It was a tribute of sorts because

he would never dance in Jerusalem,
nor drink with Solomon the pottery maker;

one man who believed in Jesus,
but felt no sin trading earthenware
for wine-filled flasks made from goatskin.

Three years of seminary school
taught me this until the Jesuits kicked me out
when I argued that any man

has every right to engage in sodomy
with the woman he loves.

Black night, likely stars.

I love you more when the dead are near me
and moonlight turns the meadow blue
like a New Orleans' dirge played by Coltrane.

Moon, stay where you are,
I love it that you have no friends
yet continue to shine above our perditions.

Elegy, stop this burning of leaf and limb
we have no way of knowing
if the textbook illustrations are true,

if all the hymns give up the dead
like ferns in a forest
that rustle around our feet.

Will we domesticate the Bobcat,
pull down the sun in a fit of genius,
or try and find Godot
explaining Medusa away?

Black night, likely stars,

solo embrace of the moon's ligature
tight around my neck,
let me run through everything

and through nothing-
at this hour all the unchecked bags
are waiting at lost and found.

Black night, likely stars.

Maybe you will last, maybe
you will give me one more chance to ask,

field mouse will you forgive me?

Michael P. McManus
West Monroe La

Lost in the Woods

I pause in the creek bottom
of an alder thicket
to drink in cool water
and reflect on the classic way
I got into this mess
merely by following deer
as dark approached.

Last night it was 28 degrees
and I am wet,
soaked clear through.
Glasses lost to a branch
and down to one boot,
I laugh and think
that I, the outdoorsman,
may die tonight

and how, whether I do or not,
the blurred stars
look like Christmas lights
in the giant Sitkas.

#

In Our Time

Lewis and Clark would be fined
for hiking in wilderness areas
without a permit,
maybe jailed for exceeding
the legal limit of salmon.

"I understand you boys
is out drawing things,"
a sheriff may say,
"jest don't be drawing
any of our things
round here."

Bored out of their wits,
our adventurers would grow fat
eating Cheetos
and living vicariously
through Blockbuster movies,

working as temps
in old folks' homes,
daydreaming of Alaska
beyond the neon moon
of another Indian casino.

Scott T. Starbuck
SanDiego, CA

"I began in Ohio,
I still dream of home."

James Wright 1927-1980

James, if you reach down hard
enough with me through the Cleveland dirt,
layers of shale and garbage earth
you and I might touch dreams

and failed seeds of Irish root mothers,
those without names, frayed rope lives tied
down on tin shanty roofs far from the bright
sun of Western Ireland's night.

We might find stained glass
from St. Mary's of the Flats,
bottles of Holy Water blessed
by Amadeus Rappe,

here on this island,
on the edge of a sliding city
at the beginning of a another century
of already too much pain.

Your finger bones could rise
from the grave and help
me scribe the sounds;
broken rosary beads buried

in unsanctified ground,
candled hymns and High Mass
lights, hidden baptisms
and rectory marriages

intertwined with blessings
from knotted Carmelite rope.

The cracked tea cup
stained brown inside
at the bottom,
leaves of green tea
gone
like the reader and her readings.

And further on to the south and west
past hills, time, and swamp tales
of Ohio City, we could discover petrified tracks,
patiently waiting,
inside clay cliffs or fields
of abandoned story.

You could help me find words,
create heel and toe casts
from Cleveland Steel's
hired Pinkerton men;
or my grandfather
and his union friends
hiding out at night
too afraid to go home
and bring the weight of violent shoes
to narrow wooden steps.

We two, could shine halogen lights and search
for the trace and smell of sweat hanging
from haloed images 'of longshoremen heads:
the boys' fresh from the docks,
as they stood at the main corner of the Angle,
Detroit and old Pearl: watching greenhorn girls
walk past after a day of service with the millionaires
on Euclid Avenue;

unaware of the future
only we can see;
a cathedral wedding and twelve priest Mass,
or lives magnetized by bar stools and beer bottles.

All mere memory shapes; holograms and dance shoes
sticking to us like nightclothes on hot summer nights.

But maybe all we can find are residue of oak tree limbs
fallen and scattered into an American hope for coal,

blooming into diamonds of rust,
while the Midwest lake and its ceaseless winds,
embrace a crying banshee reconnoitering for the soul ashes
of the forgotten dead.

Mary C. O'Malley
Ohio

The Practice of Inverting the Human Heart

Last night you were unhinged. You were like some desperate,
howling demon. You frightened me. ...Do it again. - Morticia Addams

Imagine seventy-two names inscribed
upon the petals of a sunflower

or the four lettered Name of God
arranged within the inverted human heart

so that everything is inside out or upside
down and always exposed

like the time you held me, tears
streaming immaterial messages so full

of meaning, I thought I would never
need to talk as I did before

incoherency made it impossible
to describe how our tongues paused

inside that kiss, how our mouths
press together but nothing is airtight.

Pipe Dreams

I misheard lyrics playing on the stereo
when I was waiting for mascara to dry.
It emphasized the luminous shine of
wanting you because all afternoon
I'd fantasized about what we could do
with soft leather. If this is less controlled
that craving a Moroccan market place
where women wear black and men
escape to pray every Friday, I'd say
desire could be the tantalizing lower lip
on the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea.

Alison Easterly
Australia

Undertaking

He leans his sternum light
above each body's grace,
his breath is like the face
of Summer's breeze at night.
His hands are kind, like kites
revere the wind they place
their crosses down, they lace
the wounds, they end the fight.
If I were gone, my body
left, I'd want this ferryman
to cut the line, toss it,
push me off. Because heavy
are the days on land
we go soft into such flight.

C. J. Sage
San Jose, CA

Falling

The leaves are down the lower branches sag
like the springs of unruly passion's bed

Above this fatal evidence face up
to the seeming summer sun the tree basks
bare-armed branches cocked high behind its head

Confident as an aging athlete that
can't acknowledge the limber legs are gone

Still the will persists, the sap still rises
desire still pits eros against scleros

In quiet air the trembling yellow leaves
diffuse the steady sun still strong and warm
that quickens now the mottled hand in mine.

Jim Boring

The Secret Underlife of Slugs

Name it. Name it, I told myself, delirious,
in that apartment at three a.m., all language
evacuating the premises. But I was afraid.
The gorgeous golden harvester moon swirled bursting
through my window spotted with flakes of snow

a slow melt consumed. Across from me,
in that bed hunched, rumpled, in its covers,
even the buffalo-plaid throw dangling its fringes
askew, you slept facedown in a pale nesting
of pillows I wanted, for the scantest of flashes,

to remove, to watch you suffocate
in our soiled opulence of bedding, your face blanker
than the Lady of Shalott's when she confronted her vision,
went drifting dead down the river to Camelot
where Lancelot, like me, could dote

on the face of a corpse.
Name it. But I couldn't. Language strangles itself
before images. Terror a tenderness wafting
seven veils, all of them binding
my eyes. Silently you slept while I

contemplated your strangenesses. Would you love me
when you woke? That evening,
while the moon, fresh-risen, swallowed mouthfuls
of blizzard until, choking, it crumbled, disintegrated, vanished,
you'd spread my clamped legs with the gentlest

of palms. I'd never had anyone peer into those depths.
Blossom; vermiculus; red-gold, imploded star: sweet names
for what I dreaded, the unraveling of self before
a pushing so primordial all women, I thought, must
despise it. Inside me, you rocked forward, away,

the starbursts of your blackening eyes magnified
by pupils dilating to explosion. Inside,
I felt nothing except the clamping closed subtler
than the eyelid furling over what it protects,
the tender flesh unmarred by design, the keeping still

a resistance, all those horrific words
technical in their effusions,
the yellowed jaundiced man
loving me against a subway grate in a wraparound
black coat so stiff in its soilings it rose and rose and rose,

flapped like a single dark wing.
Everything, from that day, dirt, dirt, and the world
reduced to cigarette butts, lipsticked and stubbed,
vanishing between railings. His boot against
my breasts, the endless clamor of a shout

silenced fluttering
inside my chest. But it's easy to say people can change.
Or want to. Or will. While you slept, I still felt
you inside me, the dark unctuous thrumming connecting
cell to cell, accommodating a vision larger than love.

I wanted you to fuck me. I wanted you to die.
In the end, either would've sufficed. But when clouds
brighter than snow buried that grotesquer moon,
when your breaths steadied so sonorously I sensed
they'd never, that morning, fail,

I crouched low against our sad still bed
and comforted myself with both hands.

Terri Brown-Davidson
Lincoln, NE

SIX QUIET ARCHITECTURES

1. enters with bird; through stores
& eyes & quietly will over tables, fly - while he does:

2. quiet recess and shattered
outline of an attic schooner, ceasing; like Autumn, she:

3. sewn into quilt of, worn on a widow's nest, these two &
one hundred; where her eyes, so akin to August ribbons while they are breaking:

4. again quiet stares, and through again tonight's haze
of broken hymnals; her creases, one remarks, how they sweat beneath the work light:

5. where you've repeated this after hush, I also fail mention of roses; either, your
eyes:

6. And separates, and then; moving
from eyes who - often vacancy of, often eyes abandoned by -

eirck mertz
Oregon

BONAVENTURA
(F.G. Wetzel, 1779-1819)

There you go again, wrapped in your night-
habit under a filched name,
calling the over-lasted hours.

It's easy enough to count a man's frays
and tatters when you yourself go
incognito as a fool. But, Brother,
how else could you walk city streets
under so many sane eyes?

Here, an oak tree leans and shivers
at the edge of a neighbor's security-
light. Porch-light, flicker-glow
from his TV.

You could see right through
his walls, how he stares
at the devil in the tube
or the nothing behind the screen;

or does he simply look, tonight,
within
to watch a cancer growing?

I sit inside my own
dark windows marking the moon's
shadow-dance with clouds.
You and I, we share that moon

in all this landscape, where every-
one has turned to stone.

Taylor Graham
Somerset, CA

Melancholic

At the window,
birds of Matisse.
Legs like the center of tubes and the day
so cold. I wrap in my arms,
learning to live with them. I shiver a
stone deep tree loosening shudder
like movements of sea.

The creek center rolls
under a bridge.
Water erases a V in flight.
How many do I remember
now that I count windows?
driving in small cars?
unconscious curlings from trees?
the battles with squirrels in their sleep
for crisp morsels?

My hand, tossing a small brown crust,
hovers.
Something looks like a 3.
It�s eating the width of the window.
It�s tail is as tall as the grass.
If I open the door, it is still
eating.

Kathryn Rantala
(editor/publisher of Ravenna Press and Snow Monkey)WA

Post Op

Formidable as a meat locker door,
spinach florescence of the corridor outside
65 W, his room,

inside, the air glows feverish, drained of all sun,
a bruised jaw lit from underneath
by a flashlight on Halloween.

I'm a mole sniffing at that antiseptic, familiar odor
of hospital linoleum, Lysol and a tinge of urine.
Blinking, I can make out the bodies of family pressed
to the colorless walls.

A t.v. jabbers above them.
A second t.v. jabbers behind
a tan fabric, drab cotton dividing
an already narrow room.

The gallery stares at the side show,
"The Amazing Used to Be Dad," a hodgepodge
of tubes, beeping monitors,
pulleys, and some semblance
of the man, unshaven, pale,
three quarters nude
humiliated as a Doberman
dolled up in a nighty.

Why is the remains
of fries and a reuben
on his tray table
right after the operation?
Oops,
someone else's.

Why is his wife worrying herself
over an eight page menu? How
should she know the right
hour and meal to order?

Why is there a latex glove
on the floor?

Why is the patient's gown wet,
his pillow soaked?
The intravenous is leaking,
Sorry.

Why is this still just the first day?

Lois Rosen Salem, OR

Rooms Rented by Shadows

In rooms below, lamps gather up
and snuff their bolts of light; a wide hush
sifts down like puffball spores; rag rugs
worry too hard and tear their stitches, puzzled
that their ovals of hardwood floor have so little to say.
Bread dough in the blue bowl swells like a growth
and throws off the warm wet cloth; shadows who rent
by the hour unpack bottles of gin, nail polish,
spring water, turn on pay-per-view, put on mud masks
and sprawl on the furniture.

Upstairs, all the rooms are in my lungs, my brain,
the platelets in my blood. Every prayer I say
for a loved one or stranger makes another spacious room
somewhere inside me. There are rooms
that are home to a scalawag, a nomad, a loyalist,
a forsaker, a butcher, a baker.
Something inside me gets cut to ribbons.
Something else down there rises again.

William Woolfitt
Breckenridge CO
speakingofmarvels@yahoo.com

Friends

They are with you at the big events, like a wedding,
or a party to celebrate your promotion, where you
also announce the other good news about how
your wife is pregnant again. They were there as well
at the hospital where you lay after the accident,
offering flowers and an eternity of platitudes.

They are absent at the smaller deaths, such as
those you experience along the corridor
on the way to the restroom from your office, or
on the way to the canteen downstairs for lunch,
when another light goes out inside your head

after you convince yourself this is what you have
always wanted: a generous income, a predictable
job and marriage. They agree when you tell them
how your wife is really unreasonable for suggesting
you have lost your intensity, your sense of wonder.
They also agree that you are passionate

about your work, and that work is meaningful
for its purposefulness, its sense of duty, its repetitions,
which remind you of water-drops in that Japanese
mode of torture devised to drive a prisoner insane.
They are there at your time of need; of course,

only if that need involves joining you at the bar,
a free drink now and then. They are there to loan you
a compliment or two, or a note of encouragement
during your rare moments of mild disappointment
and despair, which you are then obliged to return
in the nearest possible future, with or without
interest, depending on your mood for generosity.

They serve to remind you of what you first learnt
at the beginning of your ten-year marriage, which is
that any sort of companion, no matter how distant
or exceptionally intimate, is a compromise -
a friend, who may only ever know you as little
as you believe you know yourself.

Cyril Wong
Singapore

If You Could See Their Eyes

At the office
I am visited by
the woman who fears
optic transmitters have been
implanted in her uterus,
her nostrils, and even her breasts
to track her down.
She says that the children
she has raised were not
the ones she gave birth to
and she knows someone
switched them years ago
in the middle of the night.
She�s been told by the
judge to tell her story
to the psychiatric center
down on Oak Street,
but she says the doctors
are all imposters and will
steal her papers, her identity
and, finally, her soul.

A man who claims his
neighbors are telepathic spies,
visits me again and
again to say he sees
them everywhere.
They stop him from
sleeping and from reading.
They molest his mind
when he writes.
He quotes the Bible,
both chapter and verse.
mainly from Ecclesiastes.

I don�t know what to say
to make them change
their minds-not the woman
with her optics nor
the man with his spies nor
those who often come
to my office door
at the end of day when
the lights are dimmed
and the front desk closed.
They pass by me in
shadows-pale and fragile.
I know their names,
every one of them,
and the demons that
wake them, but it�s
the look in their eyes
I can�t get out
of my mind.

Marilyn Johnston
Salem, Oregon

* *
To beat out in a rock or to embroider on a banner
Whether term will come
Memory perishing for the Constitution
Some lines?
Memory devoted to a smoke and flame,
To flights of black birds...
Monument perishing for the Constitution -
Do not set up.
The decade has passed in dance.
The tank roar has calmed down.
Building of parliament have tinted
Also have overlooked them.
In the river the defence counsels of the Constitution lie,
The Pisces examine their skeletons.
The new pocket senators a puppet work,
The consignments divide the budget.
The leader of the advocates has thrown out a ring with needles,
Has saved the thick stomach.
In a poor province, in distant region
Have presented him a bureaucratic authority.
The Constitution is possible!
It is formality!..
Simple formality for the dictators.
The memory is easy:
Monument perishing for the Constitution -
In the red river of a cloud.

Igor Kruchik.
Kiev, Ukraine

Seed

Suited-up in yellow fat,
floating in the surgeon's
jelly jar, you are not yet

identified - lump who slipped
under radar's peerless
eye, hovered motorless,

mute in my constellating
breast, O stealth scout
advancing for your tribe.

Still dazzled in the OR's
cone of scalpel light,
stroking through a milky

amnesia - my stupid
hand's too slow to touch
the label pasted crooked

on the curved glass cylinder
that posts you from your burrow
to the slicer. You're longer

than a lima bean, I think,
as your silhouette drags me
deep under childhood dark:

the abandoned dining room
and emptied chairs, the family's
laughter drifting from the den,

their scraped plates stacked
tidy by the sink. And I,
the solitary child coned

in icy light, sentenced
to remain. Eat. My
palliative glass of milk.

My fork of duty hovering
above the glistening cluster
of small green grenades

that inhabit the dread plate.
The gleaming knife I wield
to slice them into sections

so that I can bear to take
them in, I can bear
to swallow.

Judith H. Montgomery
Bend, OR

Blue Is

crystal deep
powder pale
edge of cloud
time of night
turn of smoke
birth of rain
noon of never
blue is
saxophone
filtered over
cobblestone
blue is
half of black
blue is
tongue of beast
blue is
steel minus fire
blue is
inside ice
blue is
some kinds of motion,
some kinds of stillness.

Blue is woman's breath.

Blue is North,

hollow,

round.

Dean Metcalf
Joseph, OR

Tell the Men

I am the dream commander.

All around me
along the smoky runway
men fall, strafed
spinning
bloody
down.

I scream, but
they will not believe:
our own
top-secret
quiet-rotor
radar-guided
night-vision
heat-seeking
dream-metal dragonflies
have returned
to kill us.

2. "But they're ours!" men scream
as they stand, are hit, and fall
spinningbloddydown.

Running, my body floats above the runway
among thumb-size neon-red tracers
borne upon their own wind: puffs of it
pass between my ribs.

3. In this dream, only I know:
words
are weapons.

All around me, men see,
trying not to see.

Men fail to aim their words
at the real enemy.

Men drop their books
or read absently

standing in the open
as if life were not dangerous.

Sergeant!

Work your way down the line.

Tell the men:

Fill sandbags with words.
Build a parapet to fight behind.
If they are the right words
you live.

Tell every man:

Dip each fifth word
in your own blood,
so your shots will glow red:
tracers to locate your targets
in the dark.

Tell every man to sharpen one word.

Say, You must choose:
"yes" or "no."
Snap it onto your rifle
for when this gets down to bayonets.

Tell all the men:

It's not the men of darker skin
who broadcast our blood upon the land
as a poor shopkeeper tosses water
from a red plastic pail
to settle dust on an unpaved street.

Tell the men:

We toss our own blood in the dust
where crimson arterial spurts of it
roll into powdery skins
like water in flour
no longer recognizable as blood
it could be any dark liquid:
it could be used crankcase oil.

Tell them:

We live and die
by what we think
by what we write
by what we say
by what we do.

Tell them:

Get your words.
Get in the trench.
Here they come.

Dean Metcalf
Joseph, OR

Assault with a Deadening Weapon

Like, like, and like once machine-gun speech.
Teen babble fired off with the wounded patter
of ambushed grammar. The shrapnel of battlefield banalities
litters the beach of language mined with inarticulation.
Dialogue on crutches:
Like for as and like for like's sake, the flight
of eloquence felled by the ack, ack of prepositions,
the swan song of discourse dying.
"Like, you know, like totally awesome."

And all the while word-cop squadrons drop bombs
of feminist egomania primed with Orwellian newspeak.
Give me peace, give me rehab,
give me a British parliamentarian.

Nic Nigro
OR

stand

dazzled into this universe balanced
between shark and dolphin,
you tack with the stars in your left palm
to swim across the reef.
as the light changes,
a blue fin paints through dracaena -
fed mirrors, hazel to green eyes
scan the screens for the nuggets given up only
if snowmelt hears magpie, lobe fire, and pitch on tides.
ova nounce flute etched into magnolia blossoms,
rain drumming dune grass, then sand to brown,
the sculls now in your hands are well polished
by callus and rose, your sudden thought a caesura writ
as a reflection of lightning and whale breach propels faith
beyond the cortez machetes chopping through branch.
your life a glyph on one stone the river breathes
back into her mural. are you waiting for a green flag
to sling the octaves in your voice over the thorn jazz
of the past?
pain tides to this tide,
your ink in a calypso bubble of marrow her pearl
opens to sky cried awake by a gull, wings spread,
river mouth rolling cedar branch, leaves peeling
into current,
dolphin,
green covens
transfuse bighorn sight as you harvest the quakes,
stand and sing

Charles Thielman
Eugene, OR

My Voyage in the Garden

I came upon a great house
growing out of a centipede.
The beast moved slow enough
for me to see the faces in the window.
Down among the blades of grass,
it only seemed as if I was going
back to the source.
No, this was a new place
and, for all intents and purposes,
that grub's steady crawl
was a new method of transportation.
On that tiny trail,
I saw mother, lover, father, friend.
I saw candle light and bare bulb,
the cozy lamp-shade, the laughing chandelier.
I saw desks and closets,
and kitchen tables,
tiny fingers poking at
the thick skin of gravy.
I saw old, friendly wall paper
curling up on itself.
I saw the favorite subject
of any given day.
I heard the rustle
where what is cast in stone
meets living matter,
the resultant whisper,
you will get her back
or you are starting to resemble him.
I watched years go by
like something from the horse-age,
slow and heavy on the wheel,
almost against her will.
I knew this insect was not
the one that becomes a butterfly
but I believed something
becomes a butterfly.
So I spread my arms like wings
just in case.

John Grey
Providence, RI

A Small Space

After rubbing stardust from my eyes,
I witness the storm holding its breath.

I realize how much I love the things that hurt me.

Even the weather vane pauses before pointing
toward the country where I was born.

Theories, antonyms keep me busy
while angels sign the cast of my humor.

If love is a horse, good luck saddling it.

John Amen
editor of The Pedestal Magazine

Ego Dancing

"What am I doing? What should I be doing?"
--Tom Anthony

I'm speaking to my uncle, and we're
talking about archetypes, imago

principles; how, in Enneagram theory, each
type has two wings, how central conflicts

get further complicated by wing issues.
I tell him, my Tragic Romantic is clashing

with my Performer's need for clear direction.
Archetypally, my builder is wrestling with my seeker.

The ridiculousness of the conversation
becomes apparent. He says, "sometimes

you have to let them have at it, drop both
ends of the rope, just walk the fuck out of the picture."

I like that, still visualize it sometimes-- quibbling instincts,
voices rising in cacophony, the impostor

maestros of personality struggling for dominance.
Suddenly I am beyond them, moving into purer

space like a man undressing at the end of day,
walking naked into something unformed, greater

than the kingdom already known. In that moment,
it is easy to see in whose image I was created.

John Amen
editor of The Pedestal Magazine

Near a Power Plant

Night arrives early beneath the oaks

at the riverbank. I watch workers

tie fist-sized rope to rusted hooks

on the dock. Barges full

of mud-speckled coal kept

from the Ohio�s current.

One man seems to float as he leans

against a pile. Then it rains,

and I recognize the odor of damp wood.

The black masses coalesce

as if to avoid the boiler�s heat,

the smokestack spewing ash.

Jason Fraley




	riven poetry journal 2 and 3

	Riven 3 Riven3 Contributors: William Doreski, a d winans, john grey, Corey Mesler, Frank Engel, alison easterly, David Wodtke, Roger Weaver, Apryl Fox, ashok niyogi, Ryan Bird ----------------- 2 poems by William Doreski Peterborough, NH Vernacular of Light At the vernacular of light the hemlocks wave like spectators and the growl of traffic rehearses excuses to offer loved ones who are baking frozen dinners and measuring and mixing drinks. Another hour before night seals the forest against the human gaze; but already stray houses flare by the roadside, illuminated by the heat of TV talk shoes and the violence of video games. I've never felt more distant from the point where sky and land converge, the hills half-denuded of lumber, gravel pits aching like canker sores. Driving too fast but not fast enough I pass the Mobil convenience store glowing like the family hearth. I pass House by the Side of the Road where Easter lilies flare in plastic pots. At the vernacular of light the seams along which the suburbs plot their cancers stand exposed, but no one stops to examine these zigzag cracks in the earth that look like railroads gone insane. The hemlocks wave, no one responds, and I flick on my headlights to prove I'm a creature of the present tense, the instruments on the dashboard steady in their greenish bluish glow and everyone's loved ones anxious as brown dusk wormholes landmarks and dimensions fold and withdraw. Ice Fishing on Nubanusit My shack only four foot square, kerosene heater fuming. I've cut an eight-inch circle in the ice. Green lake water winks at me, illuminated strangely, like an old TV. My father owned the first one in the neighborhood, a thick round glossy bulge, a porthole opening into New York and Hollywood. Milton Berle, Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and sometimes Ed Sullivan when even the dog fell asleep and the weekend closed with a shrug. Now the lake beams up at me, flashes pickerel lean as lipsticks, and now and then coughs up a pike, which I lay out on the ice, photograph in grinning color, and release. I could spend my life in this shack, peering into the green gaze of the lake, breathing its eerie green light; but even with the heater gloating the cold seems deep and personal as adultery, and the fish get wise to my bait and refuse to bite; so I fold up my gear and step into the bright afternoon and breathe the sprawl of frozen lake and salute the other sporting folk sealed one by one in tiny shacks that stay distant from each other with the fey discretion of tombs. ---------------- 3 Poems by a. d. winans San Francisco, ca NORTH BEACH YUPPIE BAR Hard to believe Richard Brautigan Jack Spicer and other Beats drank here As I sit and watch two business men Playing liar's dice at Gino and Carlo's Bar In the heart of North Beach Their faces white as pie crust Wearing double breasted suits And Italian imported shirts The legal mafia making their own rules The one with the twisted smile Hides behind his dice cup His coconspirator silently poking At the olive in his martini glass Looking like a hit man waiting To fulfill a contract POEM FOR THE JAZZ MAN AT THE ANXIOUS ASP they say he's burned out but no one has bothered to tell him his Sax igniting a spark across the room his lips working pure magic each note attacking the heart strings of the soul and for one brief moment he loses sight of the bubbling spoon the heated needle each note a burst of machine gun fire just like he used to before the angel of death took him on a straight line to hell GRAND SLAM NIGHT the lights are low you can see the sweat beads bathing his face like a lizard's tongue the crowd is standing on its feet screaming, dancing, whistling stomping their feet to the tune of a marching band he's gyrating his hips making love to the mike his words are thunder lightning bolts appear from nowhere the poems are burning in his hands the crowd is screaming for more he's running up and down the aisle reciting the ten commandments backwards he's back on stage doing acrobatics the audience is spellbound the judges are frantically writing down their scores he's standing on his head he's trying to raise the dead he's brought in the Pope for a duet the guy waiting his turn looks white as a ghost ------------------ FOR ANGIE I am listening to wind rattle the windows and remembering the day she died. I'm listening to wind rattle memory of her and feeling the day she died shroud the windows, abandon the light. I'm listening to light if that's possible, the waning of it. I'm listening to death, the way light flows to it and is gone. The wind quiets now. There's a sense it won't be back. I'm remembering windows, how they looked out on days gone by. They rattle, but from her, not wind. John Grey Providence, RI ----------------- Porch Poem I took a pad of paper to the porch to escape the heat. A storm the size of the city raged about me. All I could manage was these thirty words. Corey Mesler Memphis, TN ----------------- The Fisherman My mother's father took me to fish in Maine in the summers. Yellow jackets shunned his tan and brawny hands as they sliced fres h catch belly and bowel, scooped the heart and trifling organs, spilled them, glimmering, into sunlight onto the cutting board amidst the scales. He breaded the fish, fried them in butter, slit their slender ridge of back to the dorsal fin opened them like a book, lifted aloft their spinal translucence, devoured the salted tail like a prize. He taught me the loon's cry, the slant of sun, the knife and pliers grip of bait and hook, the lightning landmark pine. He taught me to row. I learned the persistence of mosquitoes, the incense of Cuban cigars. One afternoon, far from shore, the old fisherman, astern with tackle box, tended lines and hooks, selected spinners, puffed his stogy. I plied the small green boat, absently mesmerized by whirlpools borne through silent sweep of oar. We sat without words; a fish struck, rattled the bamboo pole against the gunwale, against my reverie. Smoke enveloped the old man's head; he gathered the rod; his fingers worked the line, tested tension, played the fish, guessed its size, small, against the great arch of rod. The old man bid me row to keep from dropping other lines to snag. A dark green white-bellied catch beat its tail against the sky, desperate for the cold and calm below. Disgusted, with slow contemptuous deliberation, the old man grasped the length of leader two feet from the hooked mouth, dragged the red-marked perch across the gunwale, raised his arm, flung the catch wide in an arc. Water flew from line and fish, caught prism bursts of sunlight spiraled in architecture so perfect, so incongruous. He brought the bony vessel thudding to the starboard caprail. "God damned red perch!" muttering, squinting against the sun and cigar, beads of sweat forming like a rash on his brow. "God-damned red perch too bony to eat." With care he dragged the flopping fish along the starboard hull, raised his tethered catch again with elbow crooked and scribed a powered arc above his head, his loose-fleshed, veined and soft white skin obscene beneath his sleeves. The tailed fish strained backward to the sky, mouth and eyes fixed to the radial fisted grasp of line that etched, kaleidoscopic, across the old man's face, his frozen jaw, across the hemisphere. The red perch rested a small eternity, broken to the core, sharp with a slap upon the port gunwale; it shivered, turned gray. Amazed, I watched the fisher man carve two more arcs against the sky to beat the fish, to beat the boat. And then, no longer held to hook, the final arc released the body, flying on trivial trajectory, snaring glints of sun, slapping at the lake, to break ringlets in the silent air. His belly rolled up, and I could see the red marks against him. Frank Engel ---------------- 4 poems by alison easterly Tasmania, Astralia Insatiable The psychic said I should soak in the bath prepared by throwing in a handful of rock salt to draw the sadness out. She said I might cry or even howl but as soon as I got out of the bath, the pain would stay in the water and the water would run into a river and the river might be a murky one in Hades. The bath wasn't soothing. I worried words would dissolve or worse, the unpronounceable sounds I made when I was your lover. I also worried when an image of the way you'd call out my name appeared in a vivid dream. I was never sure if it was the dream or the wetness of the pillow that woke me. I would lie in bed wondering if the dream was a premonition of meeting you again and then, a resurrection of death. It reminds me of yew trees. The branches grow into the ground. When the central trunk dies, the tree lives on as if it has a connection with ancestry through blood. We used to be so close. And it's the touching I miss the most. And those kisses. To feel your tongue inside my mouth, how it searched, then you'd suck, nibble and lick. Perhaps if I used two handfuls of rock salt I wouldn't feel a ghost pushing words I don't want to use out of my mouth. I tried to steam, dissolve, to wash you out. The problem is, I taste your blood if I bite my lip. The psychic never mentioned this and surely she would know I'm insatiable for magical sounds dripping on the sheets. Elvis and You With you, it was different and I don't know if it's because youth was on your side or if it was something to do with instincts. The doctor mentioned studies and vital statistics and I remember it was the same as saying you wouldn't survive and if, by some slim chance you did, there'd be problems affecting your quality of life. Is that why you phoned? Did you think I'd I'd swoon watching Elvis and his hips in the privacy of the lounge room? Did you think I wouldn't think what would happen next? We'd kiss and that kiss would have you talking about our first kiss beginning a history we never can deny. I think about you all the time. But too much has happened. I don't want to kiss a dead man's lips. And I don't want to find you fat and bloated, as dead as Elvis in the bathroom. The Backpack He talks about ways he will lose himself, how he won't want to be found while she counts down the days and stays awake most of the nights listening to the train shaking the windows, the walls, the sound of restless thoughts travelling slower than anticipation yet faster that how they fell into predicting weather patterns, travel plans, the way she would fall in love with his backpack. Rubbing her hands on the fabric, then unzipping it to caress and softly kiss where he has been before he says her warmth is a heat, salty, tender and sweet. The Blindfold Amber was used by Thales of Miletus who liked the idea of rubbing fur. No record exists of other things he rubbed fur against except they say he discovered static electricity. When I think of you, I know fur and stones won't hold your interest. If I hint kinkiness with a whisper, it makes us talk about senses. Using a blindfold would prevent sight. I'd have to concentrate on touch, your lips kissing my mouth, then slowly trailing down without light, without shadows, without anything but that urgent cry drawing you to the sound of yes, o my god, yes. ---------------- qualities of doingness I remember a moment just after waking just before remembering these qualities; circumstances and uncertainties hovering between a forgotten dream and this with a certain sense of bliss that shields me from worry quivering like a spider's web in wind. I'm really in no hurry to start the day's activity - I hold this shadow close in a quiet room that glows and grows in luminosity. But for sheer pomposity I might remain. David Wodtke Oregon ---------------- Passionate Stranger Knife thin, eyes keen, you approach me, conquer within ten paces. We both know our heads will turn and look back, and then, I will follow you, surrendered. Roger Weaver Oregon American Baseball Without it, would it be Summer, without the swing of a bat, would it be Spring? Boys of wonder, these half-grown men who slide into second, hit homers, flies, forever frozen in memory, mingled with mustard, hotdogs and dust, perfect as the diamonds they will go under. Roger Weaver Oregon ---------------- Tea Leaves I would give you pieces of my misery, fold it in a napkin and put it next to your plate, with the fork and the knife and the soup spoon. It looks just fine, sitting there, alone in its misery, and I reach out and stroke the spoon with my palm. Madame Broggert will read your palm for five dollars per hand, but she doesn't see the future--it's too dense, she says, too foggy, to see a person's future in their forefinger. I don't think I'd want to see the future, anyway. Some people can see the future in tea leaves, but I'd rather drink the tea instead. Apryl Fox Flint, MI ------------------- MORNING TEA Sculpted into a wall of ice, Gods of malignant device Blight cherry orchards With early frost. Prematurely gray, This mountain dawn Moves westward Like a locust swarm, Silent plunder Of my peaks in black. Drops of dew On blades of grass Await fulfillment Of insatiable lust, Glitter with the morning ray, And then burn away. In my rose garden Bees have arrived, I contemplate This erotic interplay --- Wake my dogs, And sip at tea From porcelain cups. ashok niyogi Fremont, CA ------------ Good Times no one calls them deathbeds. the old folks bicker, like the unwrapping of nostalgia, slowly. the adjustable crane arm holding the television is never at an optimal angle. you move it and it bounces, for minutes. food becomes less distracting and wholesome when the menu grows stale. sometimes, no one is there to eat his carrots. bickering rattles onward. the bonsai is dwarfed by the shadows, but he likes it that way. she finagles the linens, stealing a kiss upon his eyelid, right in front of the whole room, for he lacks the strength to squirm away. she has the power to make him sit, she pushes the buttons which do so. Ryan Bird Toronto, Canada

	editors and guidelines: michael spring and eric wayne dickey rivenpoetry@yahoo.com poetry submissions will be accepted between July and October 31 we'll get back to you within a month

	Riven 2 contributors John Amen, Jim Boring, Terri Brown-Davidson, FEATURED POET:Leonard Cirino, Jason Fraley, Taylor Graham, John Grey, Marilyn Johnston, Erin Keane, Igor Kruchik, Alison Easterly, Michael P. McManus, eirck mertz, Dean Metcalf, Judith H. Montgomery, Nic Nigro, Joyce Odam, Mary C. O'Malley, Kathryn Rantala, Lois Rosen, C. J. Sage, Lisa Seed, Scott T. Starbuck, Charles Thielman, S.A. Thieman, Cyril Wong, William Woolfitt Featured Poet: Leonard Cirino 1 statement/7 poems State of the Arts Address With the onset of the industrial age in the late 19th century poetry began to become more commonplace, and to lose its musical qualities by the early 20th century. Although several great lyric poets emerged toward the end of the 1800's (among them Gerald Manly Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, and Emily Dickinson), since then there have been fewer and fewer who even attempt to replace them. The reasons for this could be the overall shift of the population centers from the rural to the urban and the ensuing loss of affinity to the the natural world; the dehumanization of people in the less rewarding and more physically and emotionally taxing factory work; the homogenization of phrases, idioms, and speech patterns due to the general dispora of ethnic minorities who used original language related to their specific geographical areas; and, a breakdown of many types of religious ceremonies during which people sang in choirs, and hence, gained, in their early years, the metaphors and rhythms of older hymns. There are only two examples of African-American poets in the early twentieth century that come to mind who were able to write in a Southern Black idiom and still gain recognition. The better known is Langston Hughes, a Harlem Renaissance poet, who, even in his most colloquial verse, spoke eloquently of the inner city. The other was Sterling A. Brown whose reputaion has not maintained a following among the literati of the US the second half of this century, but who is receiving attention in the Black Literature classes in the Universities. Their poetry, in the idoms of their people, is of the most purely melodic and meaningful verse. In more modern times the works of Lucille Clifton and Gwendolyn Brooks are examples of ethnic poets who use speech usually considered out of fashion or in poor taste, but with the true music of their peers. Currently, the poet Patricia A. Smith, who was born in the south side of Chicago, and now resides in Boston, catches many of the contemporary themes of modern Blacks as well as the inflections of the people whose voices she writes in. Also, at the present time, there is Spanish and English mixed in the same poems (called Spanglese). I'm not familiar with the practioners of this bilingual verse, but, the book, AKRILICA, by Juan Felipe Herrera, is a fine example of this relatively new form in that his poems are not only musical in both language, but also because he as important things to say about the world of Hispanics and the culture of the nortes. To reach even further into my position, without much foundation except a general skepticism, it seems that much recent North American poetry has not only lost its musical qualities, but it has devolved into an aesthetic of simplicity and quick takes -- because most of my generation was, at an early age, under the influence of TV. To make it worse, now there is an entire generation of young poets who were raised on computers and narcissism. Leading the the way for these poets are the deconstructionists who have tried to destroy language, and their ensuing poetic counterparts, the LANGUAGE school, both of whom have decided to market the notion of language in a material way after the manner of a horribly distorted view of Derrida's aesthetics. Along with them, but in an opposing simplistic poetics, goes the sentimentality of the Iowa School of Poets who has been described by one critic as the "Doily School". In my opinion these so-called poets are responsible for the los of idiomatic speech, originality of thought, and the corruption of poetry into sound bytes. They don't speak with intelligence or originality, but only with mouth confusion. It's as if the corporate mentality of buy and sell has somehow replaced the world of art with dishonesty. The fact that many academics (such as Jorie Graham and others) have become purveyors of these ideas, is not only appaling, but reminds me of a mass hysteria to join the crowd, to be part of this debasing force simply because it is modern or trendy. One thing is sure, these schools have total disregard for beauty, not to mention common sense. Perhaps this is a reaction to the uglification of the world and its universal dangers. As an editor, I receive at least 15 manuscripts a year from obscure and unpublished (in book form) poets who are worthy of a much wider audience. And generally, on reading the prize and award winning books of the year, including both the academics and the street poets, in most cases I find very little of an aesthetic value and an even greater lack of dimension to the writers' thinking, much less the ability to communicate beyond a meager substance. The state of the Union of poetry has come under close scrutiny in past years and most critics complain about the workshop poem. I agree, but also believe it has as much to do with the lack of roots of poets in particular and the population in general, as well as the mass confusion and violence in the world today, which leads people to undervalue a true voice and in many cases not even be able to hear one because of the fast-food like commodity poetry has become. Unless a poet has that rare youthful genius like Rimbaud or Baudelaire, or maybe even W.S. Merwin if he is to be given adequate consideration, it takes dozens of adult years to study, refine, and put to practice the art of poetry. I'm not speaking of the anemic, talky academic (lack of) work, or the in your face poems that make up a great portion of what I read in today's chapbooks and 'zines. I'm talking about poets who have seriously considered the centuries of previous work, both in their own language and translation, and who use this work as a stepping stone to modern art that is still universal in quality. It is not a task one learns in a year or five: it is a life-long discpline. Today's poets who espouse so much Ezra Pound should go back and digest his ABC of Reading. I have become tired of the glossy and highly touted books univerities, and presses like Graywolf and Copper Canyon, as well as the whole slimy and self-centered 'zine scene poets. I'm not even sure I want to read more contemporary work from the United States. My choice today is to return to the Asian classics, the Greeks and Latins, troubadours like Villon, and many of the early to mid-twentieth century southern and eastern European poets. Even though I read these only in translation they speak to me in more qualitative and musical ways than almost anything written in the US tday does. It is a sad state in my artistic life when I have to return to poets of the past rather than choose something contemporary, but it has become more and more often true. Lost Reality after Michael Hamburger homage Chagall The lovers spin like folded bats. Kissing air, they hang from limbs Like acrobats who fling outward And then decline, caught amid The grass, transformed to soil On the fervent meadow, A moon inscribes the bodies. The mad and lovely earth Describes and abstracts the shadows Of trees, the doubled lovers Lifting off the ground, embracing wind While talking with the ghosts of cows, Fluttering over steeples, towers, Barns, and houses lit with yellow Rooms, while the downward wings Slow and falter, build on the reverse Implosion of the just just-married couple Dancing to a violin, playing In the penumbra of a singing lamb. Leonard Cirino Springfield, OR As if Pain Doesn't Hurt after Miguel Hernandez It's certain an exquisite knife that eats flesh Forms my life-guiding blight on the landscape, The distinct smells and obscenities, as when Stamens stick out their tongues stiff as a hard on. I'm certain it's not about beauty or heaven, More, a trapeze act balanced as if the artist Curved his spine and flung the essence of terror - The ground is axed, her body flushes: Her heart now my mouth, ultimate, uttering. Leonard Cirino Springfield, OR Why I Should Stay Mute for Jeri At tmes I have nothing to say to you And rest my head on your breast, Touching the very crest of fortune, Milking what we've had and chosen, Asking, without a word or thought, About the things we've decided And those that have been decided for us. I know you weren't looking for love So I called out that I was lost And the search began: to bring the weight Of stone to my demented mind, to grasp Fingers in the shining light of solid air, Turn the sounds of lambs back to where Each one saw the other in a shepherd. At your breast I hear my body Remind you that all men lie. But there are no words to say I trust you like I do the work Of God - which I know is real When I rush over the hills of your flesh, Arrive at a stream, and touch the water As a madman would his lover's heart. Leonard Cirino Springfield, OR The Axeman after Siktanc Some evil things make us grip our hands In prayer. Then they jump our bones And breathe hard into the receiver We hold trying to call for help. But the room stinks and the rafters buckle Under the weight of our devils. The whole place reeks of dust: The windows covered with mold And our palms crisscrossed in worship. Somewhere out toward the barn A stranger picks up an ax and advances. He strikes and the door splinters Like a gunshot to the temple. Fright tears our souls from our bodies. He steps ino the kitchen, Scans the counters and shelves. His feet plunge into the next room Where we huddle around our children. The axeman strides forward Holding the tool with both hands And smashes the TV, the phone. We struggle, then agree to his terms, Content with the drama that turns us Inside out. Like gloves removed From our hands, we end up hanging From the clothesline of the other world. Leonard Cirino Springfield, OR A Blue Round after Wallace Stevens The wind comes strong in blue rounds Unlike summer which is a dreamer's world, Or autumn, which turns frosty and scolds The ice that cracks out its wounds. Therefore, the supreme realist sings of rain And the scorn that arrives in winter With the few-bird overcast weather And blue birds going insane, But, oh, the trees are vascular, Mud is mired, the air Whips the earth, limbs become bare, The naked roots turn muscular. The soil cries out its ardor While bears birth beyond any order. Leonard Cirino Springfield, OR Little Fucking Beggars He throws the birds out of his yard - Little fucking beggars - all they want Is rice and corn and he doesn't have enough For his children, much less himself - A different kind of beggar whose feet And legs are gone to war, he sits On the corner, in a chair, but can't Stand to give thanks for his alms. When he can, he drinks whisky. But cheap wine will do, And once in a while he'll choke Down a light beer. When the day ends with a lost sun He wheels his way home, the pines swing Back and salute him, the earth tilts sharply, And he becomes the angel of dark solitude. Leonard Cirino Springfield, OR Lovely in the Bones He talks like a man dead in the forehead. A soldier, loving part of the past, And hating the parts in the clouds, He arrives at the horizon unkempt And bearded with the feathers of a loon. His shape is wounded like a hill in combat, His chest sinks to his waist with age. Before his eyes the sky becomes a dove, And he laughs like the sea turned wild, Biting the sand. The moon looks past And watches it drown. Dawn, Lovely as the bones of a delicate fish, Burns like the stars, cooing on waves. Leonard Cirino Springfield, OR Sweet Aphrodite on a Bicycle Drag your raggy ruffles through the puddled gutter. The gauzy tulle night wraps over the French Quarter. It's never quite dark, is it? Neon trashy divas glow in doorways and I wait in the corner of this tiny decaying bar. You cycle slowly through the window's phantom lip smears. The low clouds move faster than your legs can pump. Over the slick cobblestones, untied corset ribbons brush the lamppost and you're gone, mouthing couplets into a fog. I close my eyes, inhale your passing scent: bougainvillea and mildew. By the river, a trumpet sings, muted. Pocket change rings the bottom of this coffee can. Erin Keane Louisville, Kentucky keane@sensilla.com NO Yes, I mean, No. I agree, to not disagree -- make concessions, smile to be safe. But inside I am dangerous. I take my secret pencil and scrawl a loud reverberating NO! on the wall to be read by you while I turn away and pour hot tears into the soup I stir so carefully. No. Yes. I am dangerous Joyce Odam Sacramento, CA TODAY IS NOT THE DAY Today is not the day for luck. For rage, perhaps; for staring at the rain. But today has come too swiftly, on borrowed news, with static and wet shoes. And with today comes those two proper sisters, Grim and Lonely, who sit on my two chairs. I feed them whiskey and dirty blues. They blur and whisper. The man I am holding is half unholy - the half I'm telling - the other half is heavy with mute clues. Today is not the day I choose for dim remember. The sisters are sleeping now: I follow the secret smile and meaning. Joyce Odam Sacramento, CA ARDOR I was never the one they saw they passed right through me leaving rough impressions I was always the one absorbed by light they thought I was a window birds broke against me and I grieved rain knew me and we wept together -- glistening Joyce Odam Sacramento, CA chant number three in a series for alice your roman nose and eyes flashing emerald the broad smile an aisle for teeth wearing crowns marks from the kessell bloodline one mountain man two gladiators medicine stones and deer jerky garnet lipped babies to draw runes and string the beads long after your womb ran dry you signed your name with a bone dipped in indigo lit the pipe and smoked your dreams set with the sun a baby cried at the breast of night S.A. Thieman paper lure the engraved biceps were invitations to a dance i missed but no longer knew steps to had shoes for i returned home to your book left open on the night stand an island orchid blooming long beyond season S.A. Thieman Black Night, Likely Stars Out there, the screech owl could be love's answer to despair as it perches on its limb, and screeches the only ode it knows. Tell me, who listens to this? Yesterday, I killed a field mouse by striking it on the head with a sharp blow from my shovel. And, I swear that the tiny soul on its release, streamed skyward before my eyes like an orb of light freed at last from its earth-bound pi�ata. I buried that shovel and danced near the compost pile for John the Apostle. It was a tribute of sorts because he would never dance in Jerusalem, nor drink with Solomon the pottery maker; one man who believed in Jesus, but felt no sin trading earthenware for wine-filled flasks made from goatskin. Three years of seminary school taught me this until the Jesuits kicked me out when I argued that any man has every right to engage in sodomy with the woman he loves. Black night, likely stars. I love you more when the dead are near me and moonlight turns the meadow blue like a New Orleans' dirge played by Coltrane. Moon, stay where you are, I love it that you have no friends yet continue to shine above our perditions. Elegy, stop this burning of leaf and limb we have no way of knowing if the textbook illustrations are true, if all the hymns give up the dead like ferns in a forest that rustle around our feet. Will we domesticate the Bobcat, pull down the sun in a fit of genius, or try and find Godot explaining Medusa away? Black night, likely stars, solo embrace of the moon's ligature tight around my neck, let me run through everything and through nothing- at this hour all the unchecked bags are waiting at lost and found. Black night, likely stars. Maybe you will last, maybe you will give me one more chance to ask, field mouse will you forgive me? Michael P. McManus West Monroe La Lost in the Woods I pause in the creek bottom of an alder thicket to drink in cool water and reflect on the classic way I got into this mess merely by following deer as dark approached. Last night it was 28 degrees and I am wet, soaked clear through. Glasses lost to a branch and down to one boot, I laugh and think that I, the outdoorsman, may die tonight and how, whether I do or not, the blurred stars look like Christmas lights in the giant Sitkas. # In Our Time Lewis and Clark would be fined for hiking in wilderness areas without a permit, maybe jailed for exceeding the legal limit of salmon. "I understand you boys is out drawing things," a sheriff may say, "jest don't be drawing any of our things round here." Bored out of their wits, our adventurers would grow fat eating Cheetos and living vicariously through Blockbuster movies, working as temps in old folks' homes, daydreaming of Alaska beyond the neon moon of another Indian casino. Scott T. Starbuck SanDiego, CA "I began in Ohio, I still dream of home." James Wright 1927-1980 James, if you reach down hard enough with me through the Cleveland dirt, layers of shale and garbage earth you and I might touch dreams and failed seeds of Irish root mothers, those without names, frayed rope lives tied down on tin shanty roofs far from the bright sun of Western Ireland's night. We might find stained glass from St. Mary's of the Flats, bottles of Holy Water blessed by Amadeus Rappe, here on this island, on the edge of a sliding city at the beginning of a another century of already too much pain. Your finger bones could rise from the grave and help me scribe the sounds; broken rosary beads buried in unsanctified ground, candled hymns and High Mass lights, hidden baptisms and rectory marriages intertwined with blessings from knotted Carmelite rope. The cracked tea cup stained brown inside at the bottom, leaves of green tea gone like the reader and her readings. And further on to the south and west past hills, time, and swamp tales of Ohio City, we could discover petrified tracks, patiently waiting, inside clay cliffs or fields of abandoned story. You could help me find words, create heel and toe casts from Cleveland Steel's hired Pinkerton men; or my grandfather and his union friends hiding out at night too afraid to go home and bring the weight of violent shoes to narrow wooden steps. We two, could shine halogen lights and search for the trace and smell of sweat hanging from haloed images 'of longshoremen heads: the boys' fresh from the docks, as they stood at the main corner of the Angle, Detroit and old Pearl: watching greenhorn girls walk past after a day of service with the millionaires on Euclid Avenue; unaware of the future only we can see; a cathedral wedding and twelve priest Mass, or lives magnetized by bar stools and beer bottles. All mere memory shapes; holograms and dance shoes sticking to us like nightclothes on hot summer nights. But maybe all we can find are residue of oak tree limbs fallen and scattered into an American hope for coal, blooming into diamonds of rust, while the Midwest lake and its ceaseless winds, embrace a crying banshee reconnoitering for the soul ashes of the forgotten dead. Mary C. O'Malley Ohio The Practice of Inverting the Human Heart Last night you were unhinged. You were like some desperate, howling demon. You frightened me. ...Do it again. - Morticia Addams Imagine seventy-two names inscribed upon the petals of a sunflower or the four lettered Name of God arranged within the inverted human heart so that everything is inside out or upside down and always exposed like the time you held me, tears streaming immaterial messages so full of meaning, I thought I would never need to talk as I did before incoherency made it impossible to describe how our tongues paused inside that kiss, how our mouths press together but nothing is airtight. Pipe Dreams I misheard lyrics playing on the stereo when I was waiting for mascara to dry. It emphasized the luminous shine of wanting you because all afternoon I'd fantasized about what we could do with soft leather. If this is less controlled that craving a Moroccan market place where women wear black and men escape to pray every Friday, I'd say desire could be the tantalizing lower lip on the mouth of the Mediterranean Sea. Alison Easterly Australia Undertaking He leans his sternum light above each body's grace, his breath is like the face of Summer's breeze at night. His hands are kind, like kites revere the wind they place their crosses down, they lace the wounds, they end the fight. If I were gone, my body left, I'd want this ferryman to cut the line, toss it, push me off. Because heavy are the days on land we go soft into such flight. C. J. Sage San Jose, CA Falling The leaves are down the lower branches sag like the springs of unruly passion's bed Above this fatal evidence face up to the seeming summer sun the tree basks bare-armed branches cocked high behind its head Confident as an aging athlete that can't acknowledge the limber legs are gone Still the will persists, the sap still rises desire still pits eros against scleros In quiet air the trembling yellow leaves diffuse the steady sun still strong and warm that quickens now the mottled hand in mine. Jim Boring The Secret Underlife of Slugs Name it. Name it, I told myself, delirious, in that apartment at three a.m., all language evacuating the premises. But I was afraid. The gorgeous golden harvester moon swirled bursting through my window spotted with flakes of snow a slow melt consumed. Across from me, in that bed hunched, rumpled, in its covers, even the buffalo-plaid throw dangling its fringes askew, you slept facedown in a pale nesting of pillows I wanted, for the scantest of flashes, to remove, to watch you suffocate in our soiled opulence of bedding, your face blanker than the Lady of Shalott's when she confronted her vision, went drifting dead down the river to Camelot where Lancelot, like me, could dote on the face of a corpse. Name it. But I couldn't. Language strangles itself before images. Terror a tenderness wafting seven veils, all of them binding my eyes. Silently you slept while I contemplated your strangenesses. Would you love me when you woke? That evening, while the moon, fresh-risen, swallowed mouthfuls of blizzard until, choking, it crumbled, disintegrated, vanished, you'd spread my clamped legs with the gentlest of palms. I'd never had anyone peer into those depths. Blossom; vermiculus; red-gold, imploded star: sweet names for what I dreaded, the unraveling of self before a pushing so primordial all women, I thought, must despise it. Inside me, you rocked forward, away, the starbursts of your blackening eyes magnified by pupils dilating to explosion. Inside, I felt nothing except the clamping closed subtler than the eyelid furling over what it protects, the tender flesh unmarred by design, the keeping still a resistance, all those horrific words technical in their effusions, the yellowed jaundiced man loving me against a subway grate in a wraparound black coat so stiff in its soilings it rose and rose and rose, flapped like a single dark wing. Everything, from that day, dirt, dirt, and the world reduced to cigarette butts, lipsticked and stubbed, vanishing between railings. His boot against my breasts, the endless clamor of a shout silenced fluttering inside my chest. But it's easy to say people can change. Or want to. Or will. While you slept, I still felt you inside me, the dark unctuous thrumming connecting cell to cell, accommodating a vision larger than love. I wanted you to fuck me. I wanted you to die. In the end, either would've sufficed. But when clouds brighter than snow buried that grotesquer moon, when your breaths steadied so sonorously I sensed they'd never, that morning, fail, I crouched low against our sad still bed and comforted myself with both hands. Terri Brown-Davidson Lincoln, NE SIX QUIET ARCHITECTURES 1. enters with bird; through stores & eyes & quietly will over tables, fly - while he does: 2. quiet recess and shattered outline of an attic schooner, ceasing; like Autumn, she: 3. sewn into quilt of, worn on a widow's nest, these two & one hundred; where her eyes, so akin to August ribbons while they are breaking: 4. again quiet stares, and through again tonight's haze of broken hymnals; her creases, one remarks, how they sweat beneath the work light: 5. where you've repeated this after hush, I also fail mention of roses; either, your eyes: 6. And separates, and then; moving from eyes who - often vacancy of, often eyes abandoned by - eirck mertz Oregon BONAVENTURA (F.G. Wetzel, 1779-1819) There you go again, wrapped in your night- habit under a filched name, calling the over-lasted hours. It's easy enough to count a man's frays and tatters when you yourself go incognito as a fool. But, Brother, how else could you walk city streets under so many sane eyes? Here, an oak tree leans and shivers at the edge of a neighbor's security- light. Porch-light, flicker-glow from his TV. You could see right through his walls, how he stares at the devil in the tube or the nothing behind the screen; or does he simply look, tonight, within to watch a cancer growing? I sit inside my own dark windows marking the moon's shadow-dance with clouds. You and I, we share that moon in all this landscape, where every- one has turned to stone. Taylor Graham Somerset, CA Melancholic At the window, birds of Matisse. Legs like the center of tubes and the day so cold. I wrap in my arms, learning to live with them. I shiver a stone deep tree loosening shudder like movements of sea. The creek center rolls under a bridge. Water erases a V in flight. How many do I remember now that I count windows? driving in small cars? unconscious curlings from trees? the battles with squirrels in their sleep for crisp morsels? My hand, tossing a small brown crust, hovers. Something looks like a 3. It�s eating the width of the window. It�s tail is as tall as the grass. If I open the door, it is still eating. Kathryn Rantala (editor/publisher of Ravenna Press and Snow Monkey)WA Post Op Formidable as a meat locker door, spinach florescence of the corridor outside 65 W, his room, inside, the air glows feverish, drained of all sun, a bruised jaw lit from underneath by a flashlight on Halloween. I'm a mole sniffing at that antiseptic, familiar odor of hospital linoleum, Lysol and a tinge of urine. Blinking, I can make out the bodies of family pressed to the colorless walls. A t.v. jabbers above them. A second t.v. jabbers behind a tan fabric, drab cotton dividing an already narrow room. The gallery stares at the side show, "The Amazing Used to Be Dad," a hodgepodge of tubes, beeping monitors, pulleys, and some semblance of the man, unshaven, pale, three quarters nude humiliated as a Doberman dolled up in a nighty. Why is the remains of fries and a reuben on his tray table right after the operation? Oops, someone else's. Why is his wife worrying herself over an eight page menu? How should she know the right hour and meal to order? Why is there a latex glove on the floor? Why is the patient's gown wet, his pillow soaked? The intravenous is leaking, Sorry. Why is this still just the first day? Lois Rosen Salem, OR Rooms Rented by Shadows In rooms below, lamps gather up and snuff their bolts of light; a wide hush sifts down like puffball spores; rag rugs worry too hard and tear their stitches, puzzled that their ovals of hardwood floor have so little to say. Bread dough in the blue bowl swells like a growth and throws off the warm wet cloth; shadows who rent by the hour unpack bottles of gin, nail polish, spring water, turn on pay-per-view, put on mud masks and sprawl on the furniture. Upstairs, all the rooms are in my lungs, my brain, the platelets in my blood. Every prayer I say for a loved one or stranger makes another spacious room somewhere inside me. There are rooms that are home to a scalawag, a nomad, a loyalist, a forsaker, a butcher, a baker. Something inside me gets cut to ribbons. Something else down there rises again. William Woolfitt Breckenridge CO speakingofmarvels@yahoo.com Friends They are with you at the big events, like a wedding, or a party to celebrate your promotion, where you also announce the other good news about how your wife is pregnant again. They were there as well at the hospital where you lay after the accident, offering flowers and an eternity of platitudes. They are absent at the smaller deaths, such as those you experience along the corridor on the way to the restroom from your office, or on the way to the canteen downstairs for lunch, when another light goes out inside your head after you convince yourself this is what you have always wanted: a generous income, a predictable job and marriage. They agree when you tell them how your wife is really unreasonable for suggesting you have lost your intensity, your sense of wonder. They also agree that you are passionate about your work, and that work is meaningful for its purposefulness, its sense of duty, its repetitions, which remind you of water-drops in that Japanese mode of torture devised to drive a prisoner insane. They are there at your time of need; of course, only if that need involves joining you at the bar, a free drink now and then. They are there to loan you a compliment or two, or a note of encouragement during your rare moments of mild disappointment and despair, which you are then obliged to return in the nearest possible future, with or without interest, depending on your mood for generosity. They serve to remind you of what you first learnt at the beginning of your ten-year marriage, which is that any sort of companion, no matter how distant or exceptionally intimate, is a compromise - a friend, who may only ever know you as little as you believe you know yourself. Cyril Wong Singapore If You Could See Their Eyes At the office I am visited by the woman who fears optic transmitters have been implanted in her uterus, her nostrils, and even her breasts to track her down. She says that the children she has raised were not the ones she gave birth to and she knows someone switched them years ago in the middle of the night. She�s been told by the judge to tell her story to the psychiatric center down on Oak Street, but she says the doctors are all imposters and will steal her papers, her identity and, finally, her soul. A man who claims his neighbors are telepathic spies, visits me again and again to say he sees them everywhere. They stop him from sleeping and from reading. They molest his mind when he writes. He quotes the Bible, both chapter and verse. mainly from Ecclesiastes. I don�t know what to say to make them change their minds-not the woman with her optics nor the man with his spies nor those who often come to my office door at the end of day when the lights are dimmed and the front desk closed. They pass by me in shadows-pale and fragile. I know their names, every one of them, and the demons that wake them, but it�s the look in their eyes I can�t get out of my mind. Marilyn Johnston Salem, Oregon * To beat out in a rock or to embroider on a banner Whether term will come Memory perishing for the Constitution Some lines? Memory devoted to a smoke and flame, To flights of black birds... Monument perishing for the Constitution - Do not set up. The decade has passed in dance. The tank roar has calmed down. Building of parliament have tinted Also have overlooked them. In the river the defence counsels of the Constitution lie, The Pisces examine their skeletons. The new pocket senators a puppet work, The consignments divide the budget. The leader of the advocates has thrown out a ring with needles, Has saved the thick stomach. In a poor province, in distant region Have presented him a bureaucratic authority. The Constitution is possible! It is formality!.. Simple formality for the dictators. The memory is easy: Monument perishing for the Constitution - In the red river of a cloud. Igor Kruchik. Kiev, Ukraine Seed Suited-up in yellow fat, floating in the surgeon's jelly jar, you are not yet identified - lump who slipped under radar's peerless eye, hovered motorless, mute in my constellating breast, O stealth scout advancing for your tribe. Still dazzled in the OR's cone of scalpel light, stroking through a milky amnesia - my stupid hand's too slow to touch the label pasted crooked on the curved glass cylinder that posts you from your burrow to the slicer. You're longer than a lima bean, I think, as your silhouette drags me deep under childhood dark: the abandoned dining room and emptied chairs, the family's laughter drifting from the den, their scraped plates stacked tidy by the sink. And I, the solitary child coned in icy light, sentenced to remain. Eat. My palliative glass of milk. My fork of duty hovering above the glistening cluster of small green grenades that inhabit the dread plate. The gleaming knife I wield to slice them into sections so that I can bear to take them in, I can bear to swallow. Judith H. Montgomery Bend, OR Blue Is crystal deep powder pale edge of cloud time of night turn of smoke birth of rain noon of never blue is saxophone filtered over cobblestone blue is half of black blue is tongue of beast blue is steel minus fire blue is inside ice blue is some kinds of motion, some kinds of stillness. Blue is woman's breath. Blue is North, hollow, round. Dean Metcalf Joseph, OR Tell the Men I am the dream commander. All around me along the smoky runway men fall, strafed spinning bloody down. I scream, but they will not believe: our own top-secret quiet-rotor radar-guided night-vision heat-seeking dream-metal dragonflies have returned to kill us. 2. "But they're ours!" men scream as they stand, are hit, and fall spinningbloddydown. Running, my body floats above the runway among thumb-size neon-red tracers borne upon their own wind: puffs of it pass between my ribs. 3. In this dream, only I know: words are weapons. All around me, men see, trying not to see. Men fail to aim their words at the real enemy. Men drop their books or read absently standing in the open as if life were not dangerous. Sergeant! Work your way down the line. Tell the men: Fill sandbags with words. Build a parapet to fight behind. If they are the right words you live. Tell every man: Dip each fifth word in your own blood, so your shots will glow red: tracers to locate your targets in the dark. Tell every man to sharpen one word. Say, You must choose: "yes" or "no." Snap it onto your rifle for when this gets down to bayonets. Tell all the men: It's not the men of darker skin who broadcast our blood upon the land as a poor shopkeeper tosses water from a red plastic pail to settle dust on an unpaved street. Tell the men: We toss our own blood in the dust where crimson arterial spurts of it roll into powdery skins like water in flour no longer recognizable as blood it could be any dark liquid: it could be used crankcase oil. Tell them: We live and die by what we think by what we write by what we say by what we do. Tell them: Get your words. Get in the trench. Here they come. Dean Metcalf Joseph, OR Assault with a Deadening Weapon Like, like, and like once machine-gun speech. Teen babble fired off with the wounded patter of ambushed grammar. The shrapnel of battlefield banalities litters the beach of language mined with inarticulation. Dialogue on crutches: Like for as and like for like's sake, the flight of eloquence felled by the ack, ack of prepositions, the swan song of discourse dying. "Like, you know, like totally awesome." And all the while word-cop squadrons drop bombs of feminist egomania primed with Orwellian newspeak. Give me peace, give me rehab, give me a British parliamentarian. Nic Nigro OR stand dazzled into this universe balanced between shark and dolphin, you tack with the stars in your left palm to swim across the reef. as the light changes, a blue fin paints through dracaena - fed mirrors, hazel to green eyes scan the screens for the nuggets given up only if snowmelt hears magpie, lobe fire, and pitch on tides. ova nounce flute etched into magnolia blossoms, rain drumming dune grass, then sand to brown, the sculls now in your hands are well polished by callus and rose, your sudden thought a caesura writ as a reflection of lightning and whale breach propels faith beyond the cortez machetes chopping through branch. your life a glyph on one stone the river breathes back into her mural. are you waiting for a green flag to sling the octaves in your voice over the thorn jazz of the past? pain tides to this tide, your ink in a calypso bubble of marrow her pearl opens to sky cried awake by a gull, wings spread, river mouth rolling cedar branch, leaves peeling into current, dolphin, green covens transfuse bighorn sight as you harvest the quakes, stand and sing Charles Thielman Eugene, OR My Voyage in the Garden I came upon a great house growing out of a centipede. The beast moved slow enough for me to see the faces in the window. Down among the blades of grass, it only seemed as if I was going back to the source. No, this was a new place and, for all intents and purposes, that grub's steady crawl was a new method of transportation. On that tiny trail, I saw mother, lover, father, friend. I saw candle light and bare bulb, the cozy lamp-shade, the laughing chandelier. I saw desks and closets, and kitchen tables, tiny fingers poking at the thick skin of gravy. I saw old, friendly wall paper curling up on itself. I saw the favorite subject of any given day. I heard the rustle where what is cast in stone meets living matter, the resultant whisper, you will get her back or you are starting to resemble him. I watched years go by like something from the horse-age, slow and heavy on the wheel, almost against her will. I knew this insect was not the one that becomes a butterfly but I believed something becomes a butterfly. So I spread my arms like wings just in case. John Grey Providence, RI A Small Space After rubbing stardust from my eyes, I witness the storm holding its breath. I realize how much I love the things that hurt me. Even the weather vane pauses before pointing toward the country where I was born. Theories, antonyms keep me busy while angels sign the cast of my humor. If love is a horse, good luck saddling it. John Amen editor of The Pedestal Magazine Ego Dancing "What am I doing? What should I be doing?" --Tom Anthony I'm speaking to my uncle, and we're talking about archetypes, imago principles; how, in Enneagram theory, each type has two wings, how central conflicts get further complicated by wing issues. I tell him, my Tragic Romantic is clashing with my Performer's need for clear direction. Archetypally, my builder is wrestling with my seeker. The ridiculousness of the conversation becomes apparent. He says, "sometimes you have to let them have at it, drop both ends of the rope, just walk the fuck out of the picture." I like that, still visualize it sometimes-- quibbling instincts, voices rising in cacophony, the impostor maestros of personality struggling for dominance. Suddenly I am beyond them, moving into purer space like a man undressing at the end of day, walking naked into something unformed, greater than the kingdom already known. In that moment, it is easy to see in whose image I was created. John Amen editor of The Pedestal Magazine Near a Power Plant Night arrives early beneath the oaks at the riverbank. I watch workers tie fist-sized rope to rusted hooks on the dock. Barges full of mud-speckled coal kept from the Ohio�s current. One man seems to float as he leans against a pile. Then it rains, and I recognize the odor of damp wood. The black masses coalesce as if to avoid the boiler�s heat, the smokestack spewing ash. Jason Fraley

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