Red Booth Review

Still Life With Grapes • Howie Good

2011-12-02T13:27:00.002-07:00

for Barbara

In the last little bit of woods
where I sometimes walk our dog,
stepping over the beer cans
& take-home Styrofoam containers,
I found today a cluster of wild grapes
shining darkly in the dimness.
I picked one. It was good.
Maybe you’re right, after all,
about there being life on other planets.

[+]

Howie Good is a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz.

Supermarket • Shannon Cuthbert

2011-12-01T05:57:00.000-07:00

I stroll the aisles, listless as lettuce and king crabs.
When I was king of Spain, I built marble sandcastles
and danced with duchesses,
ferris wheels in their gowns.
Ship lights poked through the curtains at night,
like tusks of ivory beasts slain in India
by some dashing maharajah.

Fluorescent lights above me, ghostly chicken carcasses
and graveyards of flesh around me,
a haddock’s toothless grin.

Today a girl in a bus window smiled,
bone structure so regal I was
surprised to find her toothless.
Does she run her tongue over the empty spaces,
a phantom limb?
Nightmares of
celery unsnapped, carrots uncrunched, she wakes alone.
I imagine one gray kiss at the bus stop,
my tongue draws back
at the stories these empty spaces tell.

[+]

Shannon is a creative writing and psychology major from Hamilton College.

Red Booth Review • Volume 6: Issue 3.

2011-08-30T03:57:00.005-06:00

Juan Zapata, Jr.

Poems
1976 • David LaBounty
Three Poems • Howie Good
October • David Russomano
Two Poems • Lee Stern
In This Office • Mira Martin-Parker
Two Poems • Matthew Gasda
Harm's Way • David-Matthew Barnes
Poem Made of Sleep & Dreaming Head • Cheryl & Janet Snell
This Side Up & Claustrophobia • Cheryl & Janet Snell

Art
Two Photos • Brian Brown
In Her Room 2 • Jeff Foster
Only in Avalon • Juan Zapata, Jr.
Two Photos (Paris) • Laura Kazdan
Two Photos • Sarah Katharyna Kayss
I Love Paris in October • Soulis
Boat Yard • Merlin Flower

1976 • David LaBounty

2011-08-13T02:33:00.001-06:00

I remember standing in my room at night, under the
ancient shelter of faraway gables

I remember the wonder of the transistor radio, playing in the
smallness of my once still hand

I remember the radiator, forever coiled against the
plaster of winter’s eternal wall

I remember how I was warmth, how I was the
potential for warmth

as the fog of my breath stained the
untroubled window

[+]

David LaBounty has held jobs as a miner, a mechanic, a reporter and a salesman. His work has appeared in Rattle, the Los Angeles Review, Booth, the New Plains Review, Night Train, SmokeLong Quarterly and other journals. His first collection of poetry will be released in the fall of 2011 from Elm Ridge Books.

Two Photos • Brian Brown

2011-08-09T13:54:00.000-06:00

[+]

Brian Brown is a documentary historian, photographer, and widely published poet, in Savannah, Georgia. Recent credits include Tulane Review, Clementine, Chiron Review, The Ottawa Citizen, Subliminal Interiors, as well as book covers for W. W. Norton and Dancing Moon Press. His website is Vanishing South Georgia.

Notes of a Very Minor Poet • Howie Good

2011-08-08T14:13:00.001-06:00

1
Flood me, Lord, as they flood
played-out coal mines,
get Franz Wright to accept
my Friend Request,
but, first of all, answer the door.

Amen.

2
I don’t like cats,
but a dog might be good company.
I could take it on long walks,
feed it from my plate,
name it for a famous dead author.

3
You don’t get poetry.
The words are just words to you,

empty boots in the stirrups
of a riderless horse,

an unheard forecast for sunshine later.

[+]

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love Dagger from Right Hand Pointing, To Shadowy Blue from Gold Wake Press, and Love in a Time of Paranoia from Diamond Point Press.

October • David Russomano

2011-08-07T14:09:00.000-06:00

The sound of feet through dry piled leaves.
Been picking things up. I think I talk
too much. It bothers me. Born
this month. A long conversation
about loss of faith. Four geese fly
overhead. Phone call, my brother’s voice
seems different miles away. Why is that
cluster of working hours called a shift?
“I am bored”, written twice in chalk.
Hypnotic windshield wiper motion.
A tree sprawled across our street,
red flares burn on pavement.
Transcendence could be quiet
evaporation, so different from clamorous
rain. Leaves on carpet and beer bottle caps.
Shadows different in the camera flash.
Street lamp makes drops of water
on the car window look like stars.
Dilemmas of worth. The smell
of cold air and car exhaust reminds me
of Athens. I remember collecting things
when I was younger. The collections didn’t
come to anything. All the while, trains went by.
No matter where you slept, the rumble and
warning whistles sounded close enough.

[+]

David Russomano studied abroad in Greece and India before graduating in 2006 with a BA in creative writing from Messiah College. His poetry has been featured in the online publications Write from Wrong and This Great Society. It is also scheduled to appear in an upcoming issue of Women in REDzine. He currently teaches English in Turkey.

In Her Room 2 • Jeff Foster

2011-08-06T06:08:00.001-06:00

[+]

Jeff Foster is living Missouri, doing art and photography since 2000. Influenced by Bosch,Wyeth, Klimt. On display in gallaries in Missouri and Kansas.

Poem Made of Sleep & Dreaming Head • Cheryl Snell & Janet Snell

2011-08-05T11:56:00.000-06:00

This is the moment
you are most alone,
systems thudding blood,
breath stretching to a yawn.
A tear made of the day
escapes like the slow start of rain
and your fingers curl slightly.
Around what? Street sounds
doppler away, also refusing to be held.
There's no fear of the numbness
that creeps through you now,
let it come,
loosening muscle, thinning thought.
At this hour, the mind talks in riddles
its language a mystery
that leaves you
breathless, nightshirt pounding,
night broken by the same dreams
that have traveled so far to touch you.

[+]

[+]

Cheryl and Janet Snell are sisters who, in addition to their solo art and writing projects, collaborate on chapbooks for Scattered Light Library. Their most recent book is a collection of paintings and poems called That Feel.

This Side Up & Claustrophobia with Orange Cap • Cheryl Snell & Janet Snell

2011-08-04T04:33:00.001-06:00

The way somersault
circles us, so long stuck.
We stir the air with a doll’s arm.

Oar, pull away. Breaker, tip us over.
Show the vantage point of the submerged
clouds wrong side up

Where we go who knows when
the knot gives way. Who, unlaced and dangling,
can almost see the ground.

[+]

[+]

Only in Avalon • Juan Zapata, Jr.

2011-08-03T14:04:00.000-06:00

[+]

Juan lives in NYC. His photography is geared towards singularity, whether it means loneliness, oddity or place; he strives to establish a presence for the ones already existent on his themes.

Two Poems • Matthew Gasda

2011-08-03T14:00:00.001-06:00

The Not Inconsiderable

You eat peanut butter with a spoon for breakfast
The dreams you had last night were cruel
And the delirium blackens, the ridges of memory
Are like Braille you trace with your fingers, but can’t seem to spell out.
Monks hunched over in the scriptorium in your head,
Scribbling some parcel of praise for the not inconsiderable.

But you’re afraid you’ll think of her continuously
For twenty years now that the dreams have brought
Her back. You can’t fathom the sounding line in the
Liquid obscurity. Other people have such
Interesting things to say, but you don’t care, it
Seems so meaningless unaccompanied by pain.

[+]

Absence

You read the same page of a novel
twelve times; his favorite book, you can’t
bear to finish it anymore. The birch
trees line the road, night-blackened
but shining like husks of dying phosphorus
in the headlights. You
talk of giants, oceans, stars, nothing
but our own blood will make the dead speak,
and nothing can violate this sorrow, so
terribly have we been joined.
The wipers flick hail-stones onto the road...
There are unsayable things between us; that
we have been left alone. The smell
of hayfires and the sea. The dark ruin
in our loins. When a child goes
we have only each other.
This is the kind of grief that makes you whole.

[+]

Matthew Gasda is a poet living in NYC.

He is currently trying to raise money for his first book through Kickstarter.

Harm's Way • David-Matthew Barnes

2011-08-03T12:12:00.000-06:00

Your father puffed too much PCP but he promised
to take you to the Great Pumpkin at the refinery
in Torrance where they painted the Union 76
oil tank with a black smile every October.

When he passed out behind the wheel,
the car slid over black gravel, heart-stopped
in the middle of the midnight field. Off
in the distance, the factory glowed orange.

It was too far to reach, so you cried for help,
shook his body, smashed your youth. Climbing
into his lap, you stretched your seven-year-old
foot to the metal and floored it to Grandma’s

in Gardena. There, you ate a broken ball
of caramel corn as a reward for being

such a good boy.

[+]

David-Matthew Barnes is the author of the novels Mesmerized, Accidents Never Happen, Swimming to Chicago, and The Jetsetters, published by Bold Strokes Books. He is also the author of over forty stage plays that have been performed in three languages in eight countries. His literary work has appeared in over one hundred publications including Review Americana, The Comstock Review, and The Southeast Review. He is the winner of the 2011 Hart Crane Memorial Poetry Award.

Two Poems • Lee Stern

2011-08-02T07:29:00.001-06:00

Gods

The things we prayed to were called gods.
And we could only pray to them in the afternoon,
because the rest of the time they were busy with their own stuff.
They had big attention spans, though,
so you could fill up the hour, say, between two and three,
and be confident that most of your concerns
would be able to get through to them.
And they didn’t pick and choose whom they would listen to.
One person’s chances were as good as the next.
The only thing they insisted on was a certain amount of privacy
and a certain sense of decorum
that most people were able to pick up most of the time,
if even after only a few half-hearted attempts.
And you notice that I haven’t said
that all of the gods were able to solve all of our problems.
My experience is that it was about one in ten.
Maybe, if you were lucky, twenty percent.
But they were there for our benefit
even if, as I was told repeatedly on a number of discrete occasions,
we were sublimely there for theirs.

[+]

The Road to Bakersfield

The road to Bakersfield starts here
next to this empty lot.
But I’ve made it very clear
that going to Bakersfield isn’t at the top of my agenda.
If I have to go in the direction of Bakersfield,
let me keep my eyes closed when I get close to it.
And open them only when I can be assured that it’s passed.
I don’t know why I have this feeling about Bakersfield.
Maybe it reminds of something that somebody once told me.
I only know that if I have to go there, I’m going to be unhappy.
And probably end up saying things that I’ll regret.
I’ll probably end up thinking that the people of Bakersfield
have nothing to say to me of any consequence.
But expect me to bring all of my obligations with me.
And arrange them not for themselves that they may look at them,
but within the hours that relegate the quantitative edge of my sight.

[+]

Lee Stern lives in Los Angeles and tries to write a poem a day.

Two Photos (Paris) • Laura Kazdan

2011-08-02T07:25:00.003-06:00

[+]

Laura Kazdan lives in a basement with ambivalence in Brooklyn, NY. Her website is http://tellingallthetruethings.tumblr.com

Three Poems • Howie Good

2011-08-01T06:33:00.001-06:00

Postwar

1
I climbed the thirteen stone steps. The sky was tilting from red toward black. You can’t find God if God doesn’t want to be found.

2
A man was strangling a woman on TV. My father said it’s OK if someone hits you to hit back. It was kind of good that our cat and dog had congruent philosophies.

3
I stayed up all night writing. I knew a lot of words. I should have been amazingly grateful. I wasn’t.

[+]

La Petite Mort
for Jones

1
I am to you as shadow
to shadowy blue,

and love is
the plump girl

who takes ballet
after school.

2
I have Mozart on.
All the windows are open.

From bushes and trees,
birds sing to each other,

sadly ambitious.

3
Animal noises in the night
and our bodies twisting together,
a kind of thunderstorm blue,

and then untwisting from within
like the surface of a mirror
rippled by a stranger’s breath.

[+]

Notes of a Very Minor Poet

1
Flood me, Lord, as they flood
played-out coal mines,
get Franz Wright to accept
my Friend Request,
but, first of all, answer the door.

Amen.

2
I don’t like cats,
but a dog might be good company.
I could take it on long walks,
feed it from my plate,
name it for a famous dead author.

3
You don’t get poetry.
The words are just words to you,

empty boots in the stirrups
of a riderless horse,

an unheard forecast for sunshine later.

[+]

Howie Good, a journalism professor at SUNY New Paltz, is the author of the full-length poetry collections Lovesick (Press Americana, 2009), Heart With a Dirty Windshield (BeWrite Books, 2010), and Everything Reminds Me of Me (Desperanto, 2011), as well as numerous print and digital poetry chapbooks, including most recently Love in a Time of Paranoia from Diamond Point Press, Inspired Remnants from Red Ceilings Press and The Penalty for Trying from Ten Pages Press.

Two Photos • Sarah Katharina Kayss

2011-08-01T06:32:00.000-06:00

[+]

Sarah Katharina Kayss born in 1985 in Koblenz (Germany), holds a B.A. in History and Comparative Religion from Ruhr University of Bochum. Her artwork, prose and poetry had been published in literary magazines in Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Canada, New Zealand and the United States. Sarah edits the PostPoetry Magazine and she currently graduates in Modern History at King´s College, University of London.

Boat Yard • Merlin Flower

2011-08-01T05:53:00.000-06:00

[+]

Merlin Flower is an independent artist and writer.

In This Office • Mira Martin-Parker

2011-08-01T05:50:00.001-06:00

berries rot in cups
boxes pile high
papers accumulate
cups of coffee grow cold

(They said I was creative.)

people come and go
phones ring
the sound of angry voices
messages are taken

(They said I was pretty.)

leaves on plants brown
envelopes and stationary
are restocked
pencils ordered

(They said one day)

computers crash
janitors empty wastebaskets
notes are taken
assignments given

(I would make something of myself, be someone.)

lunch time, the smell of food
men in suits arrive
business cards exchange
you enter

(When I'm older I'm going to travel, have money.)

mail piles up,
goes unanswered
accumulates on tables
spills onto the floor

(When I am older I want to)

recycling bins are emptied
deliveries made
you reappear
and leave again

(please tell me that when I am older I will)

files and folders
fill cabinets
fall behind desks,
are forgotten

(have a place, a beautiful place)

dust appears on shelves
on window panes
plant leaves turn brown
flowers fade

(and someone, please say there will be someone)

appointments are cancelled
announcements made
information requested
you pass quickly, in silence
distracted
not looking

(for me.)

[+]

Mira Martin-Parker is currently pursuing an MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Literary Bohemian, The Minetta Review, The Monarch Review, Mythium, Ragazine, Tattoo Highway, Yellow Medicine Review, and Zyzzyva.

I Love Paris in October • Soulis

2011-08-01T05:36:00.003-06:00

[+]

Soulis is a mathematician. He loves photography and abstractions.

Red Booth Review • Volume 6: Issue 2

2011-06-29T01:00:00.000-06:00

Nyla Alisia

And When the... • Joey Dean Hale
Dust on Floors • Shelby Stephenson
Afflatus • Thomas Piekarski
Grief • Sandra Florence
Survival Guide Gift... • Kaitlyn Stone
Sirens in Santa Cruz • Kirby Wright
Landscape #37 • George McKim
Pond View • Stan Galloway
Two Poems • Sandra Ketcham

Two Photos • Charles Taylor
Two Photos • Nyla Alisia

And When the House Burned... • Joey Dean Hale

2011-06-28T11:31:00.000-06:00

John Lennon and the Statue of Liberty
and Blues for Allah
And Old Style beer
and all the other
Posters on the walls
Snapped alive in rectangular flame
Then
gone
Before he might glimpse them
one last time
And the Nigrescent smoke
Dropped from the ceiling
like music and
Balloons for the millionth costumer
as the fire trucks rutted
The tender lawn
And volunteers watered down
his good old days
Scrapbooks in the back
of the foundered closet
An entire Stephen King collection
And when the roof caved
the sun fell
Laughing in hysterics
from behind clouds
Who just for spite
Refused to rain.

[+]

Joey Dean Hale is a writer and musician in the St. Louis area. Since receiving his MFA from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale he has published several poems and stories. His most current story and song can both be found online in the August issue of Octave Magazine.

Dust on Floors • Shelby Stephenson

2011-06-28T11:30:00.000-06:00

Steel-guitars and fiddles, accordions, mouth-harps, juice-harps,
Organs, harmonicas, mouth-organs, mandolins, banjoes, zithers, rhythms-tambourines,
Bells on ankles and feet-pianos, drums−singers-crooners, teardrops in their voices,
Pain in their hearts, yodelers, rappers, talkers, twisters, sisters, brothers, mothers, fathers:
Little Jimmy Dickens, Wade Ray, Ray Price, Hank, Webb Pierce, Red Foley,
Earl Scruggs, Bill Bolick, Mahalia, B. B., Ray−
Marty Robbins’s teardrops, Leon Payne’s “Lost Highway,”
Hank’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry,” “Give My Love to Rose”-Johnny Cash,
Reba, Dolly, Porter, Sonny, Johnny and Jack, Zimmerman, Dylan, Tom T., Patsy,
Little Richard, Aretha, Thomas A. Dorsey-“Precious Lord, Take My Hand,”
“Peace in the Valley”-Elvis-

Jerry Lee, Faron, Ferlin, Gimbel,
Isaacs, Jerry Byrd, Emmons, McCauliffe,
Jimmy Day, Noel Boggs, Josh Graves.
Waylon, Willie−and you−the Rose of my heart−

Foot-pats! Whiskey and chicken-wire−dust on floors−smell the popcorn, dogs, pop,
Beer, the stench of unspeakable toilets, Briarhopper Club-the American Legion,
The Moose Lodge.

The chittlins of my childhood come from what’s in them.
O smell of smells!

Cracklins crackle in a washpot.
You can smell them in Detroit or San Francisco.

I smell the cow’s bag, too, warm and liquid-doused,
My brother bunching her tits and sniffling the warm,
White foam steaming streams into the bucket clasped between his legs.
Fat-back sizzles in the pan.
The fishmeal smells up the feed-room.

The strings vibrate in my throat; words touch strains of death.
I do not feel the casket.

I touch my eyes for the Stephenson oval.
I smooth my clothes and walk away with Not Knowing.

[+]

Shelby Stephenson's Family Matters: Homage to July, the Slave Girl won the 2008 Bellday Poetry Prize, Allen Grossman, judge.

Afflatus • Thomas Piekarski

2011-06-28T11:26:00.000-06:00

There were orbs swirling in the sunset,
New moon fresh risen through the din.
Traffic on the town’s state highway
Choked with cars stopped and stalled.
Starved for a lark from any source,
I crawled through an invisible hoop,
Greeted by Will Rogers on the other side,
His lariat twirling lightning quick.
Then crawled through the next hoop,
Saw Napoleon squatted on a spittoon
Studying maps of Waterloo.
He nodded—another hoop appeared,
So I crawled through it as well.
There was Gertrude Stein sitting,
Reading surrealist poetry out loud.
She flipped a page and another hoop
Arrived from the orange horizon.
My crawl through this one painful
As I’d grown by leaps and bounds.

[+]

Thomas Piekarski's work has appeared in Nimrod, Agni, New York Quarterly, Paris Review, Southern Review, Ploughshares, and others. His first book was published in 2010 by Nimbus Press.

Grief • Sandra Florence

2011-06-28T11:24:00.000-06:00

Your mother in a pink dress will marry for the third time.
She searches for her mascara in the deep seat of a chair
and finds a little boy dripping egg on the upholstery.
Your brother slips on marbles, tiny planets on the floor.
In the dark
all you see is the red tip of the cigarette burning
and know at the other end
is your father.
And now your mother in the green lawn chair
waves through the dark
to a friend,
you and your brother
ride bikes
through heavy summer air.
You are standing at the edge of it.
Everything you have ever had and lost.
Why must we always lose our
warm cloth mothers,
our up-standing fathers,
must our sun-baked childhoods
turn dry and wear out?
Can’t we keep our special
pocket knife
our glowing
front-tooth-missing smiles,
our bangs chopped off, uneven
scabs on both knees,
mosquito bites?
Why must even these graces
be swept away?

[+]

Sandra Florence received her Masters in Creative Writing/Poetry from San Francisco State University. She moved to Tucson, Arizona where she has been teaching and writing for over 30 years.

She taught at the University of Arizona for eighteen years, and a number of venues throughout the community working with refugees, the homeless, adolescent-parents, women in recovery, youth at risk. She has particular interests in writing and healing, community literacy, and writing as a tool for public dialogue. She currently teaches writing and literature at Pima Community College, Desert Vista Campus.

Survival Guide Gift Box Bottle Crack • Kaitlyn Stone

2011-06-28T11:22:00.001-06:00

Wear that quiet confidence you look so good in
the one that tugs at the corners of your mild mouth
crinkles shallow crevices besides your eyes
and really knows how to fill
out a pair of pants.

Remember to shatter the supple neck of the bottle
without cutting your hands (scars are only sexy
when there's a great story behind them)
and decipher best you can:

Take down this poem and take it with you
feel it pulse in your pocket like arousal
like a bass beat, like my heart
300 miles from home.

[+]

Kate Stone is a University of Rhode Island alum with a BA in Writing & Rhetoric and English Language & Literature. During her undergraduate studies, she worked as Editor-in-Chief of the University’s literary publication, as a peer writing tutor in the Academic Enhancement Center, and was awarded the Gertrude Stein Award for excellence in writing English, and the University Award from the Rhetoric department. Her poetry and essays have been featured in Chronogram, Dr. Hurley's Snake-Oil Cure and The Longman Handbook for Writers and Readers.

Sirens in Santa Cruz • Kirby Wright

2011-06-28T01:02:00.001-06:00

Girls, blonde and delicious,
Drift like new season
From veranda
Over to the bar.

This foursome makes music
With micros waving
And stilettos
Tap-tapping the tiles.

The bartender
Arms them with margaritas.
Their mouths
Are filled with pearls.

Men play the background shy,
Not knowing how to converse
With sudden goddesses.
The girls whisper and giggle

About a George Clooney look-alike
Alone at the end of the bar.
Tongues pass through scarlet lips
To lick the salt from glasses.

[+]

Kirby Wright was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaii. Wright has been nominated for two Pushcart Prizes and is a past recipient of the Ann Fields Poetry Prize, the Academy of American Poets Award, the Browning Society Award for Dramatic Monologue, and Arts Council Silicon Valley Fellowships in Poetry and The Novel. BEFORE THE CITY, his first book of poetry, took First Place at the 2003 San Diego Book Awards.

Photos • Charles Taylor

2011-06-28T01:01:00.004-06:00

Bastrop Bridge Moon

Campus Stairs

[+]

Charles Taylor has a new book of poetry coming out called At the Heart from Ink Brush Press. He teaches creative writing at Texas A&M and has published photography in literary magazines since the 1970's.

Landscape #37 • George McKim

2011-06-28T01:00:00.001-06:00

each one
a sad architect
in their blind

twigs i once built

birdsongs
engulfed in
blue alcohol and other
clowns

with attached
violins

among the ruthless
evening

[+]

George McKim's poetry has been published, or is forthcoming in REM Magazine, Symmetry Pebbles, The Dirty Napkin, Blaze Vox, Poets and Artists Magazine, Viral Cat, Tupelo Press Sappho Poetry Project, pigeon bike, Leaf Garden Press, Clockwise Cat, 7 x 20 Journal, Eunoia, escarp, Eviscerator Heaven, Carcinogenic Poetry, Rust and Moth Journal and others. George is the editor of the poetry journal - Psychic Meatloaf - He is also a visual artist and his artwork has been exhibited in group shows in galleries and museums and recently been accepted for publication in Drunken Boat, Muzzle Magazine, Monarch Review, Otoliths, Portland Review Online, Viral Cat and Breadcrumb Scabs Poetry Journal.

Photos • Nyla Alisia

2011-06-27T00:03:00.000-06:00

[+]

Nyla Alisia is a published and award winning photographer. Nyla teaches Expanding Creative Vision photography workshops.

Pond View • Stan Galloway

2011-06-27T00:02:00.000-06:00

A second-story window
mirrored in the pond
ripples unsteadily
above the roof-vee
where a mallard’s stationed
resolutely facing north,
inverted weather-vane.

My daughter’s face is just a dish
inside that insubstantial window frame.

She can’t see me here,
nor does she know
from where I sit
the world’s turned upside down
for one of us.

I start the car. Turn south.

The water ripples.

[+]

Stan Galloway teaches writing and literature at Bridgewater College in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. His poetry has appeared online at vox poetica, Loch Raven Review, Indigo Rising Magazine, Eunoia Review, Contemporary World Literature, Connotation Press, Caper Literary Journal, Boston Literary Magazine, The Atrium, Assisi: An Online Journal of Arts and Letters, and Apollo’s Lyre. In print, his poems have shown up in WestWard Quarterly, Midnight Zoo, Carapace, the Burroughs Bulletin, and the anthologies Love Be Write and Edgar Rice Burroughs: The Second Century. His book of literary criticism, The Teenage Tarzan, came out in 2010.

Two Poems • Sandra Ketcham

2011-06-27T00:01:00.000-06:00

Falling off Hinges

A telescope hangs lonely
beneath
a fraudulent window,
painted on &
framed by bare walls.

Across the room,
shattered glass mirrors
a paned reflection of
books. They
lend punctuation
to my subtropical thoughts,
add oxygen to this cell.

In my mind
the skies flash orange &
a promise of rain blows
in through the window.

In my mind
you walk
through walls.

[+]

Florida Rain

Yesterday was a grey day
full of stacked boxes and
unopened mail
Yesterday was a sticky day
of sugar-coated sky, frothy swollen oceans,
waxy lawns
Yesterday went
dripping through our fingers
like an unused conscience
before we had a chance
to claim it
Yesterday was a grey, melty day
sticky with purple jelly
and lacking punctuation

[+]

Sandra Ketcham currently lives in Orlando where she works as a full-time freelance writer and editor. Her poetry is recently published or forthcoming in Bicycle Review, Rusty Truck, Calliope Nerve, Psychic Meatloaf, Counterexample Poetics, and many others.

Red Booth Review • Volume 6: Issue 1

2011-05-29T08:33:00.000-06:00

Gabriel Padilha

Poems
Martin Willitts Jr. • Accounting
Mercedes Lawry • Two Poems
William Greenway • Two Poems
Philip Dacey • Bibliophilia
Aimee Curran • Rotten Saturday
Dana Yost • Two Poems
Lucille Gang Shulklapper • Outsider
Howie Good • Technotopia
Nancy Lewis • Girl Flying Kite

Art
Lis Anna • The Fables #23
Chantel Schott • Statuesque
Gabriel Padilha • Coney Island Sky
Jim Fuess • Balloons #3
Juan Zapata Jr. • Still There
Spider Thorndal • Building 1

Accounting • Martin Willitts Jr.

2011-05-28T14:00:00.000-06:00

1.

My accountant father drifted into the numberless
where things are added and subtracted,
where things are accounted for.

His name was on a ledger, like all of ours.
Whatever he did, he did alone,
just like we do whatever we do alone.

There is no difference in this.
Before our journey begins or continues,
our heart weighs less than a penny nail

or more than countless stars, and what we carry
is what we have always been carrying,
no matter how secretly, no matter what others proclaim.

2.

How we depart is not up to us.
How we are seen is not up to us.
How we are spoken about is not up to us.

Our life is nomadic. The way we go on
is not up to us. The way we expire
on a timer, is not up to us.

Doctors and their tubes of electricity,
their numerous degrees and medicines,
their measured landscapes of flat lines,

the paramedic giving Breath Of Life,
the clergy offering understanding,
the man rouging our face, do not decide.

When a decision is made, nothing stops it.
When a decision is made nothing else matters ---
no negotiations, no second chances, nothing.

3.

Enter a cathedral of a plane, lifting
its wings, an albatross
parting sunlight like hospital curtains,

out of the tarmac, a white seagull,
rising its metal hull to Valhalla, into air,
a clear voice reassuring it is alright.

4.

Giving away things was easy, saying nothing.
His shoes were worn out from saying nothing.
His voice was an empty closet --- silence hung there.

Later this silence would haunt me: nothing, nothing, nothing.
Rooms with no sounds reverberating: nothing, nothing, nothing.
The sum total of his life was nothing

What does my tally sheet look like? Why do things
continue with or without us? Simple things
become complex, then becoming simple, again and again.

I have a boarding pass, where loss and found are departments.
I have hopelessness and hope, finding both restless.
My heart is an Etruscan playing double pipes.

[+]

Martin Willitts Jr recent poems appeared in Naugatuck River Review, MiPOesias, Flutter, Atticusbooks.net, Muse Café, and Caper Journal. He was recently nominated for two Best of The Net awards and his 5th Pushcart award. He has new chapbooks include: “The Girl Who Sang Forth Horses” (Pudding House Publications, 2010), “Van Gogh’s Sunflowers for Cezanne” (Finishing Line Press, 2010), “True Simplicity” (Poets Wear Prada Press, 2011), “My Heart Is Seven Wild Swans Lifting” (Slow Trains, 2011), “Why Women Are A Ribbon Around A Bomb” (Last Automat, 2011), and “Art Is Always an Impression of What an Artist Sees” (Muse Café, 2011).

The Fables #23 • Lis Anna

2011-05-28T07:53:00.000-06:00

[+]

Lis Anna’s short fiction, films, screenplays, and novels have all been nominated and won awards. She is a five time WorldFest winner, a Wurlitzer Grant recipient, a New Century Writers winner, Second Place Winner of the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Award, First Place winner of the 11th Annual Poet Hunt Award, a four time Accolade Film Competition winner, and a finalist in the Nicholl Fellowships, the Doris Betts Fiction Award, Chesterfield Film Project, and the William Faulkner Competition. She is the 2011 Readers Choice Award recipient from Fiction Fix and the Second Place 2011 Winner of the Hint Fiction Contest. Her fiction has been published in Word Riot, The Blotter, Petigru Review, Hot Metal Press, The Smoking Poet, Eclectic Flash, Paper Skin Glass Bones, 491 Magazine, Fiction Fix, The Monarch Review, 5x5 Literary Magazine, Hint Fiction Anthology and The MacGuffin Literary Review. www.lisannafilms.com or www.lisanna.net

Two Poems • Mercedes Lawry

2011-05-28T05:39:00.001-06:00

The Liars

The liars are fearless.
They move seamlessly through
stink of alley and throne,
a pale buzz issuing from mouths
that have no resting shape.
Children learn from them.
Rewards are plentiful,
flushed out of drains and pockets
as the summer winds down.
We elect them, celebrate their nerve.
We forgive them or don’t.
As close as our own midnight ghosts
and dirty minds, the liars
wait around until we need them,
flaunting their glorious distortion
of our trembling before gods.

[+]

Flirtation

There go my bones
in league with my best intentions.
Body and soul
in a pissing contest.
I have no luck
aside from the useless sort.
I won’t go beyond
the fourth step of the ladder,
inside or out.
Raspy chatter beneath
my window. Did I
forget to lock the door?

There go my arms and legs
spinning like a mad star.
It’s too late
for prayers but
I’ll study the map.
Maybe we’ll reunite
this side of paradise
or wherever you think
the dead are having cocktails.

[+]

Mercedes Lawry was born and raised in Pittsburgh, PA and has lived in Seattle over thirty years. She's published poetry in such journals as Poetry, Rhino, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seattle Review, and others. Her chapbook, There Are Crows in My Blood, was published by Pudding House Press in 2007 and she has a chapbook forthcoming in July from Finishing Line Press – Happy Darkness. She's also published some fiction as well as stories and poems for children. Among the honors she's received are awards from the Seattle Arts Commission, Hugo House, and Artist Trust. And, she;s been a Jack Straw Writer and held a residency at Hedgebrook.

Statuesque • Chantel Schott

2011-05-28T05:34:00.001-06:00

[+]

Chantel Schott is a self-taught abstract artist based in Queensland, Australia. Her artwork was featured on the cover of the 2010 McGregor Summer School brochure and she was the featured artist at Long Island Arts on-line gallery in New York. You can view her work and stay updated at her website: www.chantelschott.daportfolio.com

Two Poems • William Greenway

2011-05-27T13:30:00.001-06:00

Your Alley

It’s right up it, some people
say, and I imagine rats
scurrying beneath yellow
arc lights, winos dozing,
their backs against brick,
haggard youths shooting up
in the shadows by disheveled
trash cans waiting to be
strewn by the bumpers of perps
pursued by the Crown Victorias
of cops with sawed-offs,
and drop-guns braceleted
around their fat calves,
the numbers filed off like
the letters of a poem
no one will be able to identify
or remember.

[+]

Room at the Inn

It’s 10 pm, and we’d just be getting home from Ainie and Unkie’s, him with his big cigar, Uncle Harold, legs crossed, bored, smoking incessantly, Aunt Evelyn with her Betty Boop lipsticked lips.

Pimento cheese sandwich on white bread with potato chips and a ribbed bottle of Coke, then Rich’s coconut cake (the best on earth, ever), then us kids distributing presents from under the angel-haired tree, always socks wrapped in a ball from Ainie, for which we thanked her profusely, and for which we were welcomed, diffident and probably ashamed because that’s all she could afford.

Buzz-cut cousins Jerry and Buddy smoking cigars like their granddad, their gorgeous wives coiffed and finger-lacquered, all in that tiny house in south Atlanta, the drive home under hard stars and red, green, and blue Christmas lights blurring the windows.

Now, in Portland fifty years later, on my sister’s last Christmas Eve, I try to bring in some carols on the radio of the rental car, knowing there won’t be any Santa in the morning, only a bottle of Wild Turkey in the motel room before I drift off to sleep dreaming of the curvaceous Coke bottle, the red-nailed virgin, the incense of cigars, and those wise men, bringing booties.

[+]

William Greenway's tenth collection, Everywhere at Once, won the Poetry Book of the Year Award from the Ohio Library Association, as did his eighth collection Ascending Order. His work has appeared in

Poetry, American Poetry Review, Southern Review, Georgia Review, Missouri Review, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, and Shenandoah. He's the Distinguished Professor of English at Youngstown State University.

Coney Island Sky • Gabriel Padilha

2011-05-27T00:15:00.001-06:00

[+]

Gabriel is an Argentine photographer from Buenos Aires who now divides the year between New York City and Montevideo, Uruguay.

Balloons #3 • Jim Fuess

2011-05-27T00:01:00.000-06:00

[+]

Jim Fuess works with liquid acrylic paint on canvas. Most of his paintings are abstract, but there are recognizable forms and faces in a number of the abstract paintings. He is striving for grace and fluidity, movement and balance. He likes color and believes that beauty can be an artistic goal. There is whimsy, fear, energy, movement, fun and dread in his abstract paintings. A lot of his abstract paintings are anthropomorphic. The shapes seem familiar. The faces are real. The gestures and movements are recognizable. More of his abstract paintings, both in color and black and white, may be seen at www.jimfuessart.com

Still There • Juan Zapata, Jr.

2011-05-26T10:44:00.000-06:00

Bibliophilia • Philip Dacey

2011-05-26T10:40:00.000-06:00

Proud book-rat,
my tail, like a ribbony
marker, giving me away,
the cover pulled down
cozily over me,

blanket,
coffin-lid,
hatch on my ship.
Sing hand-heft, spine-crack,
dog-ear. Page

after page in waves,
conducted by a finger.
Riffle-music. Friends
dumbly voluble, their
solid shoulders on my shelf.

May I carry yours home after school?
Dangled by a strap around them.
The guts of a satchel
spilled on the dining-room table.
The valley of one opened,

cleavage of intelligence,
two mounds of mother-language.
In the flames of those
afraid of it, it can burn,
its power airborne.

[+]

Philip Dacey’s latest of eleven books is Mosquito Operas: New and Selected Short Poems (Rain Mountain Press, 2010). The winner of three Pushcart Prizes, two NEA grants, and a Fulbright to Yugoslavia, he has written entire collections of poems about Gerard Manley Hopkins, Thomas Eakins, and New York City. His website is www.philipdacey.com

Rotten Saturday • Aimee Curran

2011-05-26T09:50:00.001-06:00

for Michael Gizzi

I lift my pen off the paper.
It is 4:20 and outside cars are honking and tires
squeal on the pavement.
TVs blare in each room
like the world will forget about us if we don’t make enough noise.

This novel is shit in a hand-basket,
too heavy to lift off the cracked concrete street.
For a few moments, I leave it laying docile under dozens
of stomping feet. I drop it off right on the corner of
W 23rd and 6th.
I rub my hands together greedily, malice glints in my eyes
and I hope this novel feels sorry for causing me such grief,
though it is unaware of the beating it takes.

Why did Keith betray her anyway?
Is getting a girl pregnant a big enough catastrophe
to fuel a novella?

I rip out a page and crumple it with a fist.
Bitching teenagers are not how I want to spend
this Saturday but it’s too cold to go for a walk.
Maybe I’ll boil some water for tea.

Can’t anyone light a joint around here without turning heads?
It’s like the circus is in town and I’m the featured act.
I think I forgot my clubs and rings in the trunk.

I dig through my closet for a spare pen and find a ballpoint
hidden in a corner I didn’t know existed.
A fist-sized spider books it toward my foot accusingly,
as if to say “Hey you bastard, clean out this shithole.”
If my own closet isn’t clean enough for a spider,
my own clothes must stink like rotten meat slabbed on a sidewalk
on a sticky summer day when the sun threatens to melt the world alive.

Maybe Keith should just lift a gun off someone’s belt
and pull the trigger to his temple.
Then she wouldn’t have to worry about him fucking it up,
because that’s what fathers are best at anyway.

The phone rings and I let it go.
I’d rather spend the day with bitching teenagers
than listen to anything this world has to say.

[+]

While not reading, painting, and with her family, Aimee is finishing up a YA manuscript. She graduated from Roger Williams University with a degree in Creative Writing this past May.

Two Poems • Dana Yost

2011-05-26T09:02:00.000-06:00

Last Pennies

We should throw our last
pennies
into Amtrak tickets to the
Northwest
as far as we can pay for,
wherever that is, and make new
lives
and live in our own humor and
dreams
and when you get old and scared
I will hold you and tell you stories
about people we don’t know
who all died after happy
endings
to lives we didn’t live,
and tell you we had a happy
ending,
too, in a happy life,
this new life built far from
ghosts
and gossip, a life built for
two,
like a tandem bike, with
comfortable seats
and an easy glide.
The moon will belong to us,
and the elk and the hawk,
and the horned owls in trees
will be in another life,
where the river is someone else’s
but we won’t mind, as we
slip into dreams under a
blanket
borrowed from your grandmother,
flavored with the sadness of
Chinese poets
who watched dynasties end
with ships sailing to the East,
while they, exiled and
impoverished,
made homes in perches of hard
rock
above the steam.

A Day Like This

My brother
died on a day like this.
I say this
over coffee to a friend when it rains.
I say it to my
neighbor when I’m weeding the garden
with sunlight
making me sweat on a Monday afternoon.
I say it when
a snowstorm shuts down highways and schools,
say it then in
the office where I am stranded for another long day.
A day like
this.
It may have
been past midnight, both of us numbed by too many years
and old
fights.
Or just before
sunrise, a fuck-you because we’d both overslept, bosses calling.
Or the Sunday
of a holiday weekend, sunlit, blue-skied.
I have lost
track.
He died saying
last words and he died angry,
and I will do
the same some day,
my anger the
same as his, although my words will be my own.
I watched him
die, though,
and he’ll not
see me do it.
That’s the
difference. I watched him,
pissed,
shouting, grinding gravel with his work boots
walking away.
I poured
coffee. Pulled open the blade on the Ozark knife. Snapped it back.
There were no
phone calls, nor knocks at the door.
The day
drifted into silence, until it became a week, a year
until time
became meaningless
until every
day sounded, looked, smelled like every day.
The dog
breathed at my feet. I drank my coffee.
All the same.
A day like
this.

[+]

Dana was a daily newspaper editor and reporter for 29 years. He's published two books, most recently Grace, a collection of new poems, and last December's The Right Place, a collection of essays and poems. His poetry also has been published in Wolf Head Quarterly, Relief, Awakenings Review, Stone's Throw Magazine, South Dakota Magazine, Turtle Quarterly, Time of Singing, Open Minds Quarterly, and on Minnesota Public Radio's website.

Outsider • Lucille Gang Shulklapper

2011-05-24T14:55:00.001-06:00

Below me,
in some remote region,
barefoot in the grass,
arms outstretched,
a child leaps
into the wild blue yonder,
into a vanishing point, wanting.

And I,
once that child, now find myself,
grounded in the sullen sky
over Florida’s Everglades,
prowling like her panther,
endangered , on the range.

On the blurred horizon,
the sun plays peek-a-boo
with human animals,
who we were and who we are,
fighting for our lives.

[+]

Lucille Gang Shulklapper has published poems and stories in many journals as well as in four poetry chapbooks, the most recent titled In the Tunnel. She has also modeled, sold realty, made recordings for the blind, taught reading from k-college, and led workshops for the Florida Center for the Book and workshops facilitated through the Palm Beach Poetry Festival. Presently, she tutors third graders in reading as a senior volunteer, and lives with her husband, a retired pediatrician, and a rescued cat named Zoe.

Technotopia • Howie Good

2011-05-19T10:11:00.002-06:00

It’s no longer 4 a.m.
Our children
cross the street
without waking.
The song sparrow
remains silent
and well hidden.
Hearts designed
for another purpose
pump darkness
into the air.

[+]

Girl Flying Kite • Nancy Lewis

2011-05-12T05:39:00.003-06:00

We have to imagine
she had flaws, the girl
whose shade is blasted forever
into Nagasaki stone. She was doubtless
less beautiful than the outline
suggests. Red Atoll — as she was
known to her friends
for the portwine birthmark
on her left cheek —
was looping out string
to her dragon kite
when she heard a dizzying drone
in the sky and raised
her left arm to shield
her eyes from the sun, so
that when the print was made,
she was posed in a double salute. To tourists
who view the artifact of the Atomic Age
today, the girl's right arm is a compass
pointing due north, and if one's eye
follows the line her arm makes,
one sees the pure afterlife
of a mountain capped with snow. Seen
from far above the earth, the mushroom
cloud containing the molecules
of the girl must have looked
like a giant knob opening
the door to a roomful of human horrors,
lives no more than scraps of paper
to be wadded up and tossed
into a corner trashbasket.

[+]

Nancy Lewis is an award-winning journalist, award-winning poet and college professor currently residing in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Building 1 • Spider Thorndal

2011-05-12T05:37:00.005-06:00

[+]

Spider Thorndal has published his photos and poetry widely. He is a native of Baltimore, and this photo was taken there.

Now Soliciting Submissions of Poetry, Photos, and Art.

2011-01-13T14:40:00.000-07:00

Welcome to the rebirth of Red Booth Review. We're now accepting rolling submissions for our 2011 online issue.

Submit 2-10 poems or 2-5 photos or pieces of artwork to us at anytime.

Send poems in the body of the email itself along with a brief bio. Photos and artwork we prefer as smaller JPGs (640 X 480 pixesl @ 72 DPI preferred). Accepted material can then be sent in larger sizes and resolutions.

Archives are in the sidebar.

“Mostly Not” Sonnet • Maurice Oliver

2005-01-31T05:42:00.001-07:00

A “For Sale” sign on the lawn.
The morning paper. The front
stoop. Ritz crackers and golden
cheddar cheese on a white plate.
Cauliflower in the garden. Kids
chasing an ice cream truck. Your
painted handprint on art paper.
A fresh pair of pajamas on the
bed. Whiskey breath. Contact lens.
A motorcycle but no helmet. One
false I.D. Two telephone poles.
The emergency room of a hospital.
A jailhouse directly across from
the school. Puppies willing to
lick your hand. A soft pack of
cigarettes. A jet plane heading
west. High hedges that divide
the property line. A row of rusty
garbage cans. The hum of an attic
fan. Fingers drumming a table.
Moonlight moving over the carpet.
Dreams on a tiny scrap of paper.

Highway 63 • Annie England

2005-01-31T05:42:00.000-07:00

I ate french fries at a truckstop
On Valentine’s Day at 11:30 p.m.
I had been trying to figure you out
Since five squirts of ketchup,
Stuck to the cracked, vinyl
Even though I wore a coat.
We were all trying so hard
To keep our eyes open and be funny
For one another. Even though we
All wished to be somewhere else,
If only at a different table.

Portrait of My Mother as a House II • CL Bledsoe

2005-01-31T05:41:00.000-07:00

Eaves leaning down like limbs straining under heavy snow;
I climbed on your shoulders, careful not to knock any shingles
loose.

In the arms of the wind, I could see your heart bellow thumping
in time with the revolutions of the world.

I do not know you. You stand on top of the hill
up which I push my boulder. Littering the hillside

with pebbles. I’ll name them, as you did me.
What more could I hope to do.

Home Stretch • Caitlyn C. Bergeron

2005-01-31T05:40:00.001-07:00

Night-driving, slipping past gas stations
and guard-rails gone static with speed,
you unwind and recover, erratically tense,
chain-smoking through the corners
of mouth and window.

I can tell when we’re getting close
not only by the sign advertising
CORNING 13 mi.,
but in the way you slide back, relax,
ease up on the gas pedal,
even though it’s 2 a.m.

and we’re tired. Suddenly you’re no longer
in a hurry. Your voice loses its impatient crackle,
becomes all at once softer in that home stretch.

Learning Stars • John ‘Chet’ Hicks

2005-01-31T05:40:00.000-07:00

For Angela Ball

Silver gutters,
grids of lawn, two silver
towers’ signals seeking

the lake’s dark tablet.
Broadcasts submerged
in the light of train whistles
and intoxicated houses,

dioramas. I have this eye
that does crazy things, divorced,
depressed. Names are glorious lies,
say the stars.

Too Much Like Birds • Jude Roy

2005-01-31T05:39:00.001-07:00

Birdlike, the three blond haired, blue-eyed children
Cast sharp glances at the tomato plants
Looking for the green and white-striped hornworms.
They pry the fat treasures from the leaves
And squish their tomato-green guts into the dark soil
With bare brown feet.

Their reward for finding a hornworm is
One fat red tomato straight from
The refrigerator. They bite into the fruit
And tomato guts dribble
From their chins like blood.

Slow Season • Ann White

2005-01-31T05:39:00.000-07:00

The power of the evergreen lies
in its long wait, surviving by will.

While the azalea grips itself,
strangling life out of leaf to remain.

The once robust star of the bush
flutters limp and churns to loam.

Modes of life, never dying weeds,
thankless roots which persevere till Spring.

Like reptiles asleep under a dull sun,
turning by instinct, tunneling under.

We dig, huddled below ground.
We wait, light-headed in the lull.

Our turn in the slow season
lukewarm, without appetite, blind.

We hold still in hiatus, the pause
of rebirth. Patience becomes us.

Infinity • Mariel Boyarsky

2005-01-31T05:38:00.000-07:00

There is something
unbalanced in this.

He is not of two minds.

The weight of numbers
(square root of pi
limit as x approaches
infinity
tangent graphs)
these are his world.

They are hefty things, I know.
But is there not
a different heart to this:

the color of water
so gray
to be a different
darker
heartier gray
than that of its cold morning;

a landscape
desert
winter
mountains
summer;

the heavy wheel of it:
its endless path --

infinity,
no?

Sky of a Different Blue • Jason Kelly Richards

2005-01-31T05:37:00.001-07:00

Quit the K-Mart she’d worked at since high school
Stopped on the way home
To break up
With the only boy
She’d ever kissed

Pulled a suitcase
From the top shelf
Of the hall closet
Where it’d sat since the field trip
To Savannah in the seventh grade

Stuffed blue jeans
And tee shirts and tennis shoes
A few photographs
And the dress she’d worn On New Years Eve
Into the trunk of her 89 Toyota

Rushed onto the interstate
Ripped off the rear-view mirror
Determined to make
The state line
Before sun-up.

Bravery • Sid Miller

2005-01-31T05:37:00.000-07:00

The shopping cart overturned
in the ditch once held everything.
Soon rust will consume it -- morning
glories entwine the handle bar.
I walk by it each morning,
but am not yet brave enough
to say; sometimes accidents
and weeds are the most beautiful things.

Hosts • Amy Pence

2005-01-31T05:36:00.001-07:00

Savannah: night’s steam just
beginning. In our talk, stories of ex-
lovers like the ghostly hover
of bread. Rising above us,
they body forth old raptures:

your French sculptress opening
minute doors and cantilevers
into being. To free her, you merely slept --
mouth prone -- beside her.
I cried at your goodbye
to the Finnish one: an offhand
wave as the classroom door shut.

Then me: having to dream a resolution --
the old lover shows me a photo
of all his exes; like a family reunion
we name our mean aunts, the cruel
duplication of icy fathers,
our insufficiencies, a progeny
we call loss.

Hungry or not, we savor
the ghosts. Watch as they eat
the air between us.

Peanut Butter Sandwich Reflection • Arlene Ang

2005-01-31T05:36:00.000-07:00

Third grade, pink Mickey Mouse
lunch (my mother’s bad taste).
He: tousled hair not unlike
James Dean or Mickey Rourke --
I couldn’t decide;
wanting to taste my four-layered
sandwich, sip some grape juice.
It was nearly summer and I
didn’t want his soggy bread or
the egg in between.
We took turns biting under
the oak tree and soft spring sun,
called the leaves beneath
our feet Isidore. The air
pregnant with sounds:
seesaw squeaks, backyard
shouts, the school bell ringing.

Don’t Look Down • Alex Stolis

2005-01-31T05:35:00.000-07:00

Juanita’s getting tired of the late days
and short nights. She knows better
than to trust the sky to tell her the way
to the bottom of the sea -- understands

an angel needs cold wings in order to fly.
I like wide open spaces, she says, enough
room to make the really big mistakes.
Her braid falls over one eye, she’s a punk

rock Veronica Lake pulling me across
the room with a promise -- she whispers
two small lies and I thank gravity
for dragging me down from the mountain.

I Told You I Still Loved You • Joel Van Noord

2005-01-31T05:34:00.001-07:00

To trust the vestigial stages
that reappear
every now and then

As a bridge
leading back
to the thing
that pumps the heart.

That’s the trick.

To trust the middle
saying it’s an end,
then parading like the beginning.

Shelter • Dan Schillinger

2005-01-31T05:34:00.000-07:00

“Thunderstorm,” she said.
“Where I am…”
I said, “I’m seeing the same thing.”
“Good,” she said, and hung up.

The bulbs browned.
The computer howled,
was unplugged.
In the bedroom I

Unmade the bed, myself
(blinds raised). Outside,
drains choked and stopped.
Inside, the walls hummed.

How To Impale A Watermelon With A Playing Card • Martin Willits

2005-01-31T05:33:00.001-07:00

1.
smell the pack of cards to make sure they are fresh,
remove the jokers because they are uneasy

they know what will happen next,
hypnotize a watermelon

this is remarkably easier than it appears,
you will know when it is asleep when it snores

toss a card overhand between the green and white stripes,
toss with the justified anger of a jilted lover

sometimes it will glance off the surface like skipping stones
sometimes a King will kiss the pregnant belly

2.
I toss cards like tomahawks at unsuspecting objects,
they spend all day dodging meteors

a watermelon is a half moon grin,
the playing deck has toy sailboats mooring

I am arrested for having fifty-two weapons,
I escape digging a tunnel with the Ace of spades

3.
a giant watermelon thumps Tokyo houses
as planes glance harmlessly off its thick chest

it spits toxic seeds as playing cards
while American tourists with cameras plan a picnic

Light • Barry Ballard

2005-01-31T05:33:00.000-07:00

Light never centers itself in the marrow,
or the hinged diagram of swinging doors
that make up your life. It never stores
itself like embers, burning through each narrow
extremity until it exits your singed
fingertips. Instead it leans you away from the noted expectancies
of “Every Man’s Road”, to where the dead are buried,
where the battered live on the fringe

of existence, where suffering is louder
than rain. It’s there that it meets you face
to face, refracting itself in the warm
colors of enchantment (and the clouded
hue of melancholy), leaving you to retrace
the sacred out of another’s - torrid storm.

Falling • Cindy Childress

2005-01-31T05:32:00.001-07:00

You threw the kite each time
the wind blew leaves
on top tree branches,
and our black diamond
fell from sky
every time I ran, handles in hand
tangled left over right
over gravity over matter
over some velocity equation
gone awry,

but the point was never flight.
You and I on the baseball diamond
separated by the length of kite string,
a distance we accomplished
after a couple hours by the duck pond
discussing our worst sides --
anger and moods not yet displayed;
they didn’t sound bad, just unreal

and far removed
like the handles from the kite
past from the future
connected by what we might be
when the wind rolls our skies
and the kite flies.

Kaleidoscope • Barbara Archer

2005-01-31T05:32:00.000-07:00

I was searching for a mystery
newly in paperback
but found instead
a fancy-boxed flashback
lying irresistible amid
the holiday greetings
no one chose to send,
the games no one wants to play.
I took it up and held it to my
eye, to the light,
knowing what I’d see,
not expecting to find
the click and slide of
bright glass bits
enchanting as childhood Christmas.
If only the world would serve up
a new perspective with
just the turn of a wrist
or, if we so chose,
would stand still for us
as long as our hand held steady.

Mass Pike in Boston • Raymond Cavanaugh

2005-01-31T05:31:00.000-07:00

there’s something Dante-esque
about descending into the bowels
of the city
careening through the hellish tunnels
rubber scorching asphalt
asphalt peeling rubber
during the dash
from work
from home
from countless other prisons
and all for what?
maybe it’s just the convict’s thrill of escape
and what a thrill it must be
to engage
accelerate
and chase each other down
like an overwhelming reality

The Speed of Light • Allan Peterson

2004-01-31T05:29:00.001-07:00

Despite its reputation that nothing exceed it,
it lingers on the pond,
leaves only reluctantly from the nervous
silvery cottonwoods
gathered at the edge like a camping family.
But once vanished,
it stays out all night in another galaxy
leaving breadcrumbs to get back.
That's nothing.
I can be here one minute where the strings
of the driveway
are purposely united during daylight,
then to Jupiter and back
where one harebell starts the yard in its frenzy
of reexplaining.
What takes its place appears lovingly
like caressing a pet,
a Lab starting black and ending golden
as we float in our bodies
of blood and rubble so rich we'll hardly miss it,
a song at the end instead of a period

Not Mine to Remember • R.T. Castleberry

2004-01-31T05:29:00.000-07:00

Beneath a low, country moon
the dying say their rosaries
in the shade of the Cathedral Constantine.
Their fingers slip the wooden beads like whispers.
I move between them,
steps echoed in marble, slate, cobblestone.
I don't know their fears-
when they came, why they lasted,
why they fall silent in the seconds
clouds conceal the streets.
Not a native son,
I'm the wrong listener.
I'm unmoved by each season here-
by intricacies of ceremony,
the strictures of public celebration.
Newspapers fill columns
with casino totals, racetrack results.
The poor are pictured as laughing crowds
in the Summer Garden cinema.
Market stalls are full.
Sleepless, smoking again
I track the dodging line of early runners,
the gloomy stride of schoolchildren.
Burdened by misdirection
and the mistakes of my arrival,
I miss what water misses.

The Truth • Amanda Dawkins

2004-01-31T05:26:00.001-07:00

If I was given a dime
every time I looked into your smoky gray eyes,
wishing you were the tac in my toe,
my Nubian panther in the night,
serenading me with the low growl
of your jungle madness,
I could buy you the key
to my emerald city.
Imagine we were two leaves
on a sycamore tree on the corner of State and Maine,
becoming one as we fall with the seasons.
I’ve never felt as alive as I do now
- except when I’m dying in your arms,
wrapped in your down blanket,
buried in your scent.
You are the raindrops blasting on my window pain
- a testament to the stormy nature of our relations,
but the calm always comes soon after the storm.

A love poem
sways to its own rhythm,
throwing caution to the wind
of desire, escalating
to something indefinable,
something uncompromising,
something real.

The Stillness of Human Recollection • Suzanne Rindell

2004-01-31T05:26:00.000-07:00

Everyone knows the picture of perfection
is lined with a thick layer
of blank ivory snow, and no sound.
Yet the textbooks say the white color
of snow is nothing but a series of reflections.
So this is my autopsy of transparency,
made flat under the knife.
For a time I was under the impression
that to write a poem, one’s heart was required
to be wrung and hemorrhaging,
clamped in a vice, blood running like
tears, or, in the least, other bodily fluids.
All the gore of an adolescent’s
prized wound. But instead,
I find the pacific relief of small truths
rising from winter’s quiet solitude like tiny bumps of Braille.
I think of your arrival and how tidy it was,
the single weathered suitcase whose contents
you dispatched in the quartered length of a single hour.
There is something pristine about this memory as
I seep in this vacuum of absent space and sound,
it is as if I am a forgotten teabag,
surrounded by ribbons of burgundy ink.
Like all things liquid, they’ll swirl and dissipate,
I know, but only if I move.

The Museum • Jessy Randall

2004-01-31T05:25:00.000-07:00

Inside the grocery
go through the fruit section
and out the back door
there’s an enormous lake there
look, the leaves are red
in the store we couldn’t tell
here we’re above the city
There’s the museum
but look at this view
take a picture of it,
covering your eye
with the camera
The water is dark blue
like a cigarette ad
and it’s so quiet --
quiet enough for you to kiss me
Let’s take this path
I don’t know where it goes

Life Ever After • Samantha Salomon

2004-01-31T05:24:00.001-07:00

One touch promise compromise
Overanalyze, does it, she does it
Wants whole, not parts of it
All prepackaged and tangible.
Served dark, given cold.
Some time now running through
Finish cover final hours
Smash
And now sitting in darkness.
Vengence sold and no one knew.
And the thirst drive any second
Take the fall,
Lose it all in instant gratitude
Flattery corruption uncanny
Arresting staged not in breathing blinking needing
But crumpling after
Backwards
Headfirst
Struggling
She's sleeping (blue).
Aftershock seeping in slowly dreaming
Advantage taken it seems
And all the while surface screaming
Pawns ready standing
Unshaken bathed in green

Skinhead with Tattoo • Arlene Ang

2004-01-31T05:24:00.000-07:00

1.
It's a flower. Over lipids,
roses bloom into begonias.
The word Death goes around
his curve of arm with spatulate
thorns. We are alone in the room.

2.
Calipers. He has grown
sensitive to the clamp of hunger.
The back of his neck moves like
a newborn cub curled towards
its mother's breasts. I measure
him up, watch the waves
of goose pimples on his skin.

3.
Is there such a thing as
losing weight? The difference
between feather and hen is
the latter gets
sacrificed to absent gods.

4.
It is hard to explain love
to a skinhead. His motorbike
breaks down like a woman.
In the end, he prefers
the geraniums on his window sill.
Mosquitoes shun his flat.

5.
His father was never home.
I show him how to count calories
with a small scale. Day after day,
he comes back to ask the meaning
of slow release energy. Sometimes
he comes so close to taking my hand.

From the Beginning • Arlene Ang

2004-01-31T05:23:00.001-07:00

I imagined a scene worth
noting down: the luggage
tagged for Paris,
tissue undoing mascara
from her lashes, perhaps
fourth of July fireworks.

She: on the back porch,
deaf to my words.

I pictured a taxi outside,
yellow as her sundress
when summer was barely
adolescent on grass.

Tonight she unlocked
the door, the runs in her
stockings like Dear John
letters. The color on
her cheeks made me think:
This is a blind date.

A woman's heels can strike
a clear Morse code
up the stairs.

I let myself out
the same way I came in.

Untitled • Simon Perchik

2004-01-31T05:23:00.000-07:00

This flag, as the saying goes
smacks from the sun
so you salute, can use the shade

though by the time the parade cools
your fingers ache from holding up
a lovingly carved radio that once

was a woman whose voluptuous breasts
still feed you music from the forties
--love songs for common prayer

as if July, too heavy to bear
spreads out on every lawn
and by the 4th day you are listening

the way loneliness is fed, the Earth
turning you slowly on course
corrects for winds and nourishment.

Canvas • Victoria Schwab

2004-01-31T05:22:00.001-07:00

The night sky became, a negative,
An inversion of day and yet as light.
Clouds luminous, played the part of stars,
Imposters shimmering and magnified,
The crystal foam of a different ocean
Than had ever been above.
Chalk against a charcoal canvas.

Waves that moved in steady motion,
So out of place became so right.
A painting given gift of life in hues
Much deeper than shades of gray,
Stood out against an ebony, of piano keys
Or ink. As if the clouds and sky were not of one,
But from different worlds, they sat
Staring down, attracted opposites they were,
That drew in eyes and wonderment.

All looked upon this masterpiece
That called itself the night,
Not night as you or I have ever known.
The sky the heavens see
When they rest weary eyes,
The sky that stories tell of in far off lands,
The very strands of life and faith
Weave themselves to form, what some would call,
The very art of God.

Mornings dawn and light breathes
Again sweet air and golden hue,
But none forget the masterpiece
Buried by time, so much alive in souls
In hearts and minds, that saw,
That shall remember, when clouds
Played the part of stars, when two worlds met
And danced together in the sky,
That called itself the night.

Solar System • Yvette Merton

2004-01-31T05:22:00.000-07:00

Swimming pool of stars
in her eyes,
consumed with the architecture
of his face,
smooth geographies
of soft lines
chiseled craters
meteor landings,
canvas of worries
scriptures of history.

Trespassing thoughts
visiting the sun,
she left her garden,
growing her ivy
Retaining her walls
for cool constellations,
In her head...
planets align bringing
the summer solstice.

Dark Energy, Dark Matter • Eliza Kelley

2004-01-31T05:21:00.001-07:00

Stars are no longer thought
to be tiny. Something
permeates imaginary
barriers, crushes
from within
carbon, the basis and building block
of life. It is Particulate
Energy, Einstein called
the Dark Constant, a quintessence
forcing galaxies
apart, accelerating bodies
forever toward
the big rip, bound
to tear through
planet, galaxy, Bethlehem
star stuff, crowded
cafés, library doors, the back
of a green bus, exploding
cosmological
content, dark matter
that dwells
in the emptiest space between
pieces of iron, glass, heart. In grief
the bystander says
I felt blood on my head.
I saw terrible things.
I tried not to look.

And so
we, who misunderstand
gravity, rebuild razor wire
fences
no one dare say, recall
snow in summer, hollow
eyes, incalculable
ash, lice, typhus, trenches
around an approach
that never arrives, the severed
arm tattoo, intricate
lampshade number sequences
naming hourglass nebulae,
coiling a collapse
even light cannot escape.

Near the Poplars Drinking • Barry Ballard

2004-01-31T05:21:00.000-07:00

No one will recognize my momentary
disturbance buried in the river's sinking
sand. The voice of my conscience wrestling
with itself will have already cleared
the walled-up porous sanctuary
of polished gray stones. The poplars drinking
from the edges of the mind confessing
will have already straightened from what they've heard.

Even the quiet silver pools, that once
held my questioning reflection, will have spilled
the envious sunlight inside me. (It fell
into the spillway rushing away.) And the hunt
of my footsteps all covered by the hard-shelled
remains of a life with wings, something fulfilled.

A Testament • Cy Dillon

2004-01-31T05:20:00.000-07:00

In these last gray days of December
The brightest thing in the sky
Has been a trio of contrails
Thrown across the one unclouded corner of sunset

But Heraclitis’ fire still burns
Consuming and recreating all

In this season when fields stand naked
And trees lose their memory of leaves
I think I might extinguish the last coals of that fire
Live clean and empty
Desiring, above all, nothing

But even that is a desire
And wanting has always been my mentor
Steady and passionate
Real fire fed by seasoned ash and locust
Of my own cutting
Throwing erratic shadows
From the soapstone firebox
Into the darkened room
In the only house, after all,
I ever really wanted

The Permutations of the Word We • C.C. Russell

2004-01-31T05:19:00.001-07:00

Used in context:

In the Big Horns, below the medicine wheel
flipping finished cigarette butts into my pocket. As we pitched
the tent, I rehearsed it silently. The 'we' I knew was coming
then,
though I didn't know how short of a time it would last.

Sex. Her on top of me, moving in slow, uncertain circles.
Her awkward stance, her fear of bodies.

And these memories come
back
to the one who passed
away
two years now.

The two of us in her bathtub, her breasts framed by soapsuds.
I moved towards her.

Waves.

One small body
of water
coming up
against another, both lost
in the wake left.

Phone Call, 3 a.m. • Amanda Auchter

2004-01-31T05:19:00.000-07:00

He tells me that the rain
is lazy there, uneasy, unable

to make up its mind between
drizzle and downpour.

The ceiling fan stirs the humidity,
breaks the moonlight

on his walls. The shadows
are flat, enormous—

flutter of tissue, outline
of lampshade, black streak

of bedposts. He spreads
out his fingers, says that

if love was a reservoir,
we would collect nothing.

I hear the thunder and car alarms,
the quick burst

of static on the line, then silence.
Tonight, I sleep with the window open,

let the darkness fall into the gaps.

Vieux Carre • Jessica McMichael

2004-01-31T05:18:00.001-07:00

Juxtaposed between the Mississippi and the swamp
is the beaded ulcer of the South’s stomach.

Where boys smear crimson gloss on their lips and
the girls slide past their teeth;
Where I owned the cobblestone and sludge in the gutters;
Where the river spills life from its sodden womb;
Where I ran through alleys and tasted the bitterness of adoration;
Where I saw the world through a virgin’s eyes and
wept at the beauty of the rusty, dusk dry sky.

Nestled inside New Orleans, a pomegranate tree whose fruit is
decaying on the branch, spilling nectar from corroded skin.

Where incense is burned from doorways
and velvet is draped from balconies;
Where I put my hands in gloves to keep them warm;
Where the blood that’s spilt is washed away by dawn;
Where names written in cement and bathroom wall graffiti
are more precious than literature found on shelves.

Vieux Carre - a desolate wasteland of angels and masks, of
morbid splendor, left in my mouth the taste of rotten wine
and empty bottles for my eyes.

Fortune Cookies For the 21st Century • Perri Gaittens

2004-01-31T05:18:00.000-07:00

The heart, that unimportant town you must avoid
to get somewhere else more efficiently. Don’t follow it.
It is a Sunday driver at best.

The devil knows all your phone numbers.
They are legion.

On the freeway, don’t leave any empty space.
Why should you waste our resources like that?

If you are calling about the American Dream, press 1.
All other inquiries, remain on the line.

Rainstorm • Mike Beyer

2004-01-31T05:17:00.001-07:00

It was us
now me

slamming the door on an
old red car shut

on a black and
deep empty road.

White rain sheets
pound incessantly

swelling brown puddles
along the roadside.

I’ve placed
my things in a bag

and locked
them in the trunk.

I turn and face
the thrashing

trees and the
emptiness

and leave it
all behind.

Destination:
neon lights

Boy Meets Girl • Rich Murphy

2004-01-31T05:17:00.000-07:00

His vanity requires no response
and breaks a woman’s mirror:
One woman, hardly aware
of her departed lover, slips

into her make up, whereupon
a second accepts the acting life.
For Hollywood off Broadway,
she donates body parts to the poverty

of a man’s senses of self. A great
nothing blows her skirt up, and she
embeds her feet into the cement
of her shadow. With his boar’s head

pelvis and oyster in hand like his neighbor,
Mr. Fillmore, buries himself in toys
leaving behind a pile of Mimi scouring
the shallow years for a woman.

Topography • Cathy Barber

2004-01-31T05:16:00.001-07:00

We each have a topography
that defines us and therefore suits us.
Mine is the shale covered hills
of northeast Ohio. Delicate woods.
Deciduous trees. Fallow fields.
Mud and rising creek beds.
Country homes one hundred feet or more
from the road lined with roughly cut wood fences.
The space expansive.

In town, Rockefeller mansions,
yards sloping down from house to street,
tree lawns interjected with oaks and maples.
Front porches. Wide streets.
Air that dries your skin to cracking in winter
and soaks your clothes in lazying summer heat.
Puddles of storm water and oil.
A feel. A sound. A look.
All else I measure by these things.

Trans-Atlantic Blues • Carol Borzyskowski

2004-01-31T05:16:00.000-07:00

Cerulean in the bathroom, cobalt in the kitchen:
Kobold is my daughter’s cat and I am blue
because she is worried, and lives eight thousand
miles away. Miles we try to erase by email or phone
lacking the tactile reassurance of family touch.
My daughter has incredible skin: warm and buttery, plush
velvet; but she doesn’t like to be stroked.

Vienna is gray in winter, but colored sky-blue
in memory. She waves at me from a window
holding her own daughter. Their laughter floats down
to the street, gathering in her husband’s blue eyes.
He unpacks the car and I wave back.
Slate buildings streaked in soot offer protection
turquoise eyed lions guard the door.

Here in Minnesota, home is protected by wild peacocks
whose screeches echo my thoughts as I watch
the cursor out beating its version of the blues
on my computer screen. Plans and heartbeats
sometimes end in a fine mist of red
between the legs and I am sorry my love.

Asthenia • Cathy Barber

2004-01-31T05:15:00.000-07:00

The languorous Mojave,
the equatorial latitudes of summer
in my own ivied yard.
I bake. My skull burns, I
am sawdust in the heat
and speak of comfort to all who will listen;
water, shade, breeze,
not tropics, no heat wave, no summer’s oven.
I was not made for this, me
of pallid skin and pale eyes.
I want an aura of protection,
a penumbra to shelter me,
a cottage of cool around my form,
longing to be incorporeal ‘til winter.

Turning to Salt • Penny Freeland

2004-01-31T05:14:00.000-07:00

I imagine you in the pubs:
wide lapelled suits,
pant legs falling around your shoes,

accent thick as your dark hair,
carrying a black and white of Mama.

I went to your funeral,
bangs cut straight, new dress.
Mama said your family had to see I was cared for,
your sister checked my underwear for holes.

Flowers and flags, tears,
incense and chanting.
I threw up in the car on the way to Pinelawn,
you rode in a box just ahead.

I returned to second-grade,
the day before Halloween,
to boys in skeleton costumes.

Mama cried, barely spoke for a year,
lighting candles near a make-shift altar.

When she wasn’t looking,
I’d sniff your overcoats
and put my hands in the pockets.

Choking On Ice • Renee Miller

2004-01-31T05:11:00.001-07:00

tough luck college drove me mad and manic
cinched me scared spent nights on the prowl

twice I lost balance head swam in chaos
plummeted into pavement hard iced-up path
frost scraped under shiny fingernails like glass

midnight cocktails clumsy sad gestures
least unattractive will do for sweat heat music
flummox the kissing and touching with meaning

air clogs my throat I am choking neck jilted
foam from my lips limbs blundering stupid
lavender neck spots fresh from the hanging

Salt #1 • Suzanne Rindell

2004-01-31T05:11:00.000-07:00

Everybody knows
the Thames has tides
he’d said,
when I inquired about the lines.
Increments of demarcation
twined around the bulwarks,
blackened rings and at the top
something else maybe – something
lighter, salt stains maybe?

Primrose Hill:
A quieter corner of London.
Babies arriving in hospitals
overlooking the Heath.
Somewhere from a tiny window
— my face. I looked too, thoughts
of freshly burst skin, pressed through
the glass, all the while he pressed himself
inside me. You like this
Don’t you he’d said.
As if I had been given
an honest decision to make.

He showed me his new coat:
It’s shearling,
the latest thing.
Bought it in the vintage shop.
Shearling, I thought.
And pictured the trusting
lamb standing quietly;
not flinching.
The hide flayed away, snipped
thickly from its frame – still
alive. And later, a silent chalk,
salt and iron left on the alter to dry;
the dusky brown skeletal outlines
of flower petals bursting forth
in patterns of irregular bloom.

Watching Her Dress/Vernal Equinox • Michael Palmer

2004-01-31T05:10:00.002-07:00

She rises from bed, a pale-kneed woman
with capable thighs, and walks barefoot
into sunlight.

She bends like a willow over clothes:
layered pants and sweaters,
gloves and galoshes.

She’s looking for her things-
small garments to relieve buds,
smooth apparel to veil the soft spots.

Male voyeur, I linger in bed,
a thick comforter heavy with sun
on my chest.

I call to her,
but already she’s dressed and standing,
a season in short sleeves,

amazed at what seems to be
her first sunrise.

My and Van Gogh's Secret • Shana Nicholson

2004-01-31T05:10:00.001-07:00

Hidden away in a patch of cobalt sky
one stray bristle, off the paintbrush of an
impassioned hand of a man too
enraptured to notice, lies silent.

We snicker behind the backs of the grizzled
critics as they puff and pontificate over
manufactured questions
of brush strokes and composition.

God is in the chaos of the blood
red drip left lingering in the midst of
a haystack in the frenzied moment capturing the
sunlight on a blade of grass at 6:52 p.m.

As the assembly line patrons file through
discussing the ear incident,
we roll our eyes then cover our mouths and stifle
a giggle

as he gently elbows me and points at the rogue,
orange beard hair thoughtfully
tucked inside the
glowing swirl of a starry night.

In Lacombe, Louisiana • Louis E. Bourgeois

2004-01-31T05:09:00.001-07:00

Mother is at the window
calling me from a distance
of twenty years.
Her squirrel stew is still on the stove.
Carrots and purple onions drift
along the October wind.

My step-father burns
every stump in the yard
with every tire he can find.
His stomach still flat
his beard pure red.
He's waiting for the pipeline
to blow up the front yard.
One day it will.

My brother in the road --
he plays with a plastic toy --
a tow-headed boy with capped teeth.
He'll grow up vicious and fine;
many women will know him.
He'll die in some mine-shaft
leaving behind children
enough to carry his name.

I'm out there too, walking
a swamp-ridge and carrying
a single-shot twelve-gauge.
There's blood on my face: mosquitoes.
I'm out there shaking and sweating
with only half a father
and half a brother
and no mother to speak of.
I stop and listen to her voice
drifting from a long way off.

Sunrise at the Apex • Michael Palmer

2004-01-31T05:09:00.000-07:00

Here, too, you will find the breaking
of shadows, unearthing of earth at start
of the day.

One bird will call to another, and
this hearth will blossom, slow
and languid.

Here, too, morning smells fresh,
bright minted coins in memory’s cup.
Things will pass here as elsewhere they pass:

a day clears its throat, the yellow-light yawn-
an uncupping of leaves
after rain.

At Home in the Twenty-first Century • Louis E. Bourgeois

2004-01-31T05:08:00.000-07:00

The same azaleas
bloom along the ditch.

The live oak in
the front yard still
touches the ground
with its dark branches.

Crows fly in the
same sky chasing
the same hawks.

Carp still feed
on the green minnows
in the shallow pond
in the backyard.

The dust keeps
drifting in the air.

The same wind keeps
blowing through the pines.