by Allan Peterson
I do not like the step ladder
Not for the frightening heights
but sorrow has a heat that rises
and each rung echoes the stifling
silent strata of lost lives
Below sorrow it is so cold
and distant it might be Michigan
where for three months it hurts to talk
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.
by Cameron Conaway
It’s the smell of shade
or water, the quarter breath
that’s cooler than the rest,
that draws me
to draw letters
that form words
that form peace
in the desert.
By Joseph D. Milosch
this room begins
behind the mushroom
colored door
with its two dead bolts
and dry rot jamb
with its bird droppings
on the window sill among
the Wheaties crumbs
and the forked-claw prints
dressing in the curtain’s
shadow a man buckles
his belt he could be
a retired CEO down
on his luck
he could be a homeless man
rescued from the street but
he isn’t he is a man
who live in an upstairs
apartment downtown
month after month
he lives here with
these half-spread wings
these yellow beaks
a few coos
and centuries
of wheat fields
in the bowl
he placed
on the blue stool
by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof
Last month I reported a lesson found in a poem by Robinson Jeffers, “To the Stone-Cutters,” namely that nothing the individual makes, builds, or does will last forever. We delude ourselves if we think otherwise. This month we find that the lesson can be applied to our collective action. That insight was inspired by a visit the Jeffers family made to Tassajara Hot Springs in 1926. One of their twin sons, Garth, recalled, “We drove up the Carmel Valley road to the Jamesburg turnoff … After several miles we reached the resort to Mother’s relief for it was quite hot. The next morning we followed directions to the shallow cave on the wall of which are the painted hands.”Jeffers put this experience into his poem, “Hands.”
Inside a cave in a narrow canyon near Tassajara
The vault of rock is painted with hands,
A multitude of hands in the twilight, a cloud of men’s palms,
no more,
No other picture. There’s no one to say
Whether the brown shy quiet people who are dead intended
Religion or magic, or made their tracings
In the idleness of art; but over the division of years
these careful
Signs-manual are now like a sealed message
Saying: “Look: we also were human; we had hands, not paws. All hail
You people with the cleverer hands, our supplanters
In the beautiful country; enjoy her a season, her beauty, and come down
And be supplanted; for you also are human.”
Today we know little of those people who lived in Tassajara.
Last month, “To the Stone-Cutters” reminded us that no one human being leaves a permanent mark. Now this poem tells us that collectively we are impermanent. Little is known of the people who lived in Tassajara we call the Esselen. The last survivor we have record of was Isabella Meadows (1846 – 1935) who had spent part of her childhood at the Carmel Mission.
There you have it. Nothing we do will last forever… But, is there a second part to that lesson? What if we added the words … but that does not mean not putting all we have into what we do!
Hold that thought! Let’s pick it up from there on May 1!
by Neal Whitman
Susurrus of red.
Marbled godwits overhead
whoosh onto the mud flats.
A wind from nowhere.
Amazement of avocets fly over.
We whisper reverently.
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 KJ Hannah Greenberg
Except for the coccyx, which Jessica, tenaciously, was attempting to root out from under an ottoman, using only her front claws, nothing was left of Maurice Hichkins’ son, Wilson. Astoundingly, Maurice Hichkins was more concerned with his notes than with his pet.
[click to continue…]
by Neal Whitman
It’s about time! It was a tough winter for many. Spring arrives on my end of the road on March 20 at 4:02 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time. As one marches East or West from my epicenter, the time shifts one hour per time zone … and don’t even get me started on the International Date Line! Irish poet, Dennis O’Driscoll, wrote in “Tomorrow” …
Australia, how wise you are to get the day
Over and done with first, out of the way.
Season as well as Time is relative. On March 20, Australia in the southern hemisphere marks the start of autumn. Thus, Brazilian musician Antonio Carlos Jobim was inspired by their torrential rains at the end of summer when he wrote “Waters of March.” My haiku was informed by the Carmel River which John Steinbeck described as “a lovely little river. It isn’t very long, but in its course it has everything a river should have.”
waters of spring
gently flowing through my veins
in Rio a torrent
by Daryl Muranaka
This tiny room, with its bare walls
alongside the low, slanted ceiling,
my few possessions crowded , piled
one on top of another,
is suddenly huge without you
lying on the bed as I come through the door
or your suitcase with clothes stacked neatly upon it.
The flowers I bought you are still in the vase.
The smell of your mother’s apartment fades
little by little, replaced by the summer sweat.
by Kay Poiro
Looking forward to November I offer
A crisp nod to the man with
The natty overcoat and back
Carved in the arc of humiliation
Reminds me of the man hired to sit me
As a child, I anticipated his moldy smell
Yellowed fingertips and pirate stories
I still see him
At the bridge near my flat
And I almost speak to him
And he almost answers
Instead the overcoat sighs
You don’t know me
Look away.
by Chrissie Burke
when I told him about how a single flower symbolizes a dead child’s
existance
he was flabbergasted
and enraged
because the substance supporting hope became
evidence
supporting
hopelessness.
by Susan Dion
