by Sivakami Velliangiri
Each time I call him on the cellular phone
I am conscious of a circumstantial drone.
If I miss him amidst a very busy meeting, hoping
to hear a lady’s moan, it is the grocer’s shopping.
by Scott Owens
Two doves,
or one,
and a spot on my window
ride the winded wire,
one, spreading its wings
from time to time
to stay on top,
the other, absolute
in its ideal sense
of balance,
needing no wings,
and going nowhere.
By Joseph Milosch
The decal of a woman is on the red prophylactic machine in a Chula Vista bar. Across its front someone has peeled her away until she appears to have a head wound, partially encased by her undulating hair. The precise manner someone took to cut away this decal has produced a sculptured look.
The wound point is at her hairline. It widens, pear shaped, and leaks over her face. Red ink is blood that follows the curve of her lip. Blood falls in drops from her chin. Gathering into a stream flows across her breast, drapes off the tip of her nipple. The even line indicates the carver has practiced. Raising my hand, I cover her with my arm’s shadow, and listen to the silence in this shade less place where light puts the dark image of a man on the floor and wall behind him. What metal absorbs my blood heat in this hour when the air holds the human odor?
What lightless fragment follows me as I move in the community of these men? They are cruel because they have the power to be, and they go bald from the middle out showing the starkness of their core. They fear their own emotions, and can’t piss in the company of other men. They destroy the objects of their passions, and carry the motionless current of this woman’s breasts on the edge of their Buck knives.
I think of my hometown in Michigan. I think of community picnics, the farm women walking without escort, walking with voices as cool as man dug lakes, and the grass sprung back in their silhouettes. There, men sat in maple shade drinking liquor less punch, talking of wives, children, whose son had the high hard one. While in the fields iron teeth wait to rip the hard and callous soil, and wheat sleeps with its hands over its many eyes, and dreams of the combine’s slow rotation.
Now men enter this room. One looks at her from the corner of his eyes as he spits in the urinal, as he says, “Making room for one more.” Another enters, and looks at her from the corner of his eyes, “You guys better hurry, and I got to piss like a race horse!” As I leave a third enters. He looks at her from the corner of his eyes. Four men fascinated by a mutilated decal are captivated as if she is alive, electric with fragrance, excited in her high heels, her lace dress, and her savage beauty firm in the slope of her back. I know she is alive because no one has added to her defacement.
Leaving this bar, I walk to my truck and lean against its bed. The sun slides behind the top layer of fog. The sun becomes an opaque cup with a blood red rim. She comes to me with her black eyes, her painted smile.
If I could tell her more than it is not violence that drops my heart like a sand bag on top of curb and gutter. It is the men who say, “No harm was meant.” If I could tell her more than once at work a dozer hand re-cut a finished slope. I got in his face. “It is only dirt,” he said. This is not dirt, I yelled, this is the earth. I am not a cook. You’re not a cook. What we build lasts more than twenty four hours.
If I could tell her more than this, tell her I envision the cost of being a woman: to have your body become day in and day out, the receptacle for so much need, so much ill-rigged, hitched up, dangerously poised lust. She would turn her head revealing her scar, exposing a round earring, and we would listen to the wind that lifts her silken curls into the air.
Word count 650
by Martha Christina
Free of cage
and owner,
returned
to the multitude,
a parrot might
articulate
what the others
had only thought:
how good to be
one of a flock.
Blogged with the Flock Browser
by Dretta Grace White
And if the stars fail us
What becomes us then
My darling ones
What becomes us now
A song
A psalm
The unfolding line
A rhyme
Tales of sorrow so swiftly said
The heart beats once
Twice
Or none
What becomes us
My darling ones
What keeps us here
by Kippy Stewart
Under moonlights magic
Cricket songs sound long
of summers passing too swiftly,
towards Octobers Fall.
When snowflakes pile in winter,
‘ll dream dreams of summertime
Within the rhythm of Crickets lullaby….
by Howie Good
Because day by day I am less real
Because the cemetery half-listens
Because the mirror mutters too
Because stranded here for now
Because the sky is everyone’s
Because though poorly patched in places
and attracted to the form of a mountain
Because like an accidental gunshot
Because she says it isn’t raining
Because later it might
by Paul Hostovsky
The way out
isn’t under or
over or around
or even through.
It’s with. With is
the only way out.
In fact, out isn’t
the way out either.
Out is a misnomer.
by Neal Whitman
mist settles on
the soft harbor
surf sounding gentle
ship horn and seal bark
in rain on shore under fog
we know they are there
four buoys below
no one on shore but gulls
by Joseph Milosch
What we know
about the mocking bird
is next to nothing.
Some say the bird mimics
everything it hears: a chainsaw,
a Jeep wrenching an iron post,
the squeaking of a wooden gate.
Some say the bird mimics
only the animals it hears:
a feral cat, calling out its young,
a singer on the radio, and from
her room, a woman moaning
in the early morning rain.
Ornithologists say that
a mocking bird mimics
other birds, and that is
how it confuses predators.
My wife says she doesn’t care
what it mimics as long as it sings
its song in another neighborhood.
Perhaps, I respond, the mocking bird
was a raven in another life.
As punishment for steeling eggs
and eating the young of other birds,
it is condemned to live for an eternity
as a mockingbird. Forced to sing songs
of the smaller birds it terrorized, it flies
from tree to tree fleeing the bird it was.
This would explain this morning.
The night seemed to be waiting
for the sun to cross the Tropic
of Cancer. Mist seemed trapped
between being fog or drizzle
as I heard a mocking bird,
sobbing in the orange tree.
by Susan Dion
You’ve thrown those dark weary work shoes
before the old cottage’s entrance door. A summer ritual.
Deliberately discarded, the muddied, masculine footwear
conveys an image of carelessness. But these are dual sentries
whose sole mission is to halt any troublemakers,
thieves, attackers, or worse,
remaining on duty both day and night,
providing a silent security system to
protect the indoors from the outdoors
men’s size 12 D, left and right
women’s size 7 vacationing inside.
by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof
Greek philosopher, Heraclitus (535 – 475 BCE) is famous for one of the most quoted statements in the history of Western Civilization: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man. ” I am not the first, and will not be the last, to apply this universal truth to his own work. When it comes to my bailiwick, poetry, I profess …
1. No one reads the same poem twice.
2. No two people read the same poem.
Last month I was re-reading a book of poems by Korean poet, Ko Un, Ten Thousand Lives. These poems were translated by Gary Gach – I bought it when I took his haiku workshop in 2008. Ko Un started this book in prison for his political opposition where he began writing a poem for each person he could remember and continued after his release.
Now consider that when I re-read the book three years after I first read the book, I was not reading the same book because I was no longer the same person. Reading this book anew, I was struck by one poem in particular, “Hundreds of Names.” In this poem, Ko Un remembers Kim Chong-hui, a poet who signed each of his poems with a new name. Ko Un wrote,
With every page written in his sharp jagged style,
the person who wrote changed,
so how could Kim Chong-hui be just one single person?
What I now take-away is that every poem I write is by a new poet. Thus, I also profess …
3. No two of my own poems are written by the same poet.
Now, here is what is neat for me. I re-read Gary’s inscription in my copy of his book:
“For Neal Whitman who has many lives of his own.”
Whether you read or write poetry, I hope you find what is new in the New Year.
by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof
Last year, my seasonal haiku started with roving in a basket that would turn into a scarf. This morning I walked into town with it wound round my neck –– No! Not the roving. The scarf. What’s new this year? This haiku is inspired by my friend, Richard Platt, whose first novel, As One Devil to Another (Tyndale House Publishers), will be in the bookshops April 1 and already is previewed on Amazon.com. Will spare you the saga of pen to paper to press.
his first novel
in the bookstore window
present tense
by Michal Mahgerefteh
I wait for words to inscribe softly,
to direct the days to come. In this
waiting my throat is tight, unable
to voice a shade of worthy memory.
I reel in the house of flesh, listening
to the breathing of sleeping nature,
drink ’til drunk on pomegranate wine
and lean against the wordless night.
by Neal Whitman
Gypsy music in a dream
Attracts a lion to man and mandolin
Rousseau inspires the poet to capture
Contours of a ballad in crystalline color
It is a dark mysterious song
A distant murmur under the moon.
“Let me climb
On the mountain, mountain
Rumors of warm dawn
Come through the olive grove
And sing an anthem of absence.”
- Garcia Lorca