by Salvatore Buttaci
Sparrows shivering in February cold
dream of early spring when they
can fly and trill their songs
like thank-you hymns
to their God, and
Delight in the
Warmth of
soft nests,
but for
now
they
shiver.
by Paul Hostovsky
Someone has left an orange pylon
here. I look around but there’s no
work going on here, only this sign
of work. Maybe it’s a sign that work
needs to go on here. I look for the bump
or the hole. But there’s nothing. Maybe
it fell off a truck on its way to somewhere
else where there’s work. No work here though,
just this orange pylon and the problem
of what it all means. I sit down across from it,
my chin in my hands. It’s looking very
orange. Very official-looking. You could
put it in your life and people would know
to avoid you, to stay away or go
around. You could really get some work done,
dig real deep, take as long as you like,
scratch your crotch and go for a liquid lunch
and not come back for days, years, your work
still waiting for you here, all undisturbed,
this finger holding your place, pointing
to itself pointing to your work pointing up.
by Dretta Grace White
Snow-Birds settling
Made all the difference
She thought of their
Settling
And of the light they gave
And became in her way
As grey
As they
snow-bird
by Paul Hostovsky
It’s easy to love them,
the shapes of those lives,
the little huddled triangles
holding each other up
on the way into the city,
or the ones in the country
leaning only on themselves
and a silo, head in an elbow
on a hill. How beautiful
the detached view, how forgivable
all the little murders, driving by at 70,
looking into the lowered eyes of those dark houses.
by John Ian Marshall
Within these fields of intertwined grasses,
A smile, study of outstretched hands, dancing,
Dancing in a simpler past, blues tunes play on
A tiny, tinny radio, everywhere the kind of bliss
Which only occurs in dreams, spiraling, spinning,
The best of which we are awake in. Splayed
Fingers trace the tall weeds’ uneven tops, where
Even the ringing silence sounded so good.
*Tintinnabular: of or pertaining to the ringing, jingling of bells.
by Lucille Gang Shulklapper
Into
their thin-walled shells
the snails struggle, away
from juicy leaves, spray dripping with
poison.
Watching
them inch towards death, gray in the sun,
worm-like on stone pavers,
the leaves forgive
themselves.
by Joseph Milosch
When I was
in the army,
I met a woman
and went A.W.O.L.
My friends found me.
It wasn’t hard.
I was drinking.
It could of been that
I was in the same bar
that they left me in.
It could of been that
I was at her home.
They found me
and joined us.
In the end
they talked me
into doing my duty.
That wasn’t hard
either.
About the woman?
I remember her
entering a room
like the coastal
weather of Seattle
or Olympia or
Tacoma.
What did she look like?
She had lips
belonging to
the soft voice
one hears between
the absence of love
and the cold
ambitions
of the night rain
towards the park‘s
path.
Advent
by Neal Whitman
first dream of New Year–
five ships at rest on cradles
came ashore last night
Neal Whitman is a member of the Yuki Teikei Haiku Society of San Jose and the Haiku Poets of Northern California. Neal provides us with five seasonal haiku a year; in the Japanese tradition, New Year is a season and “first dream” is a “kigo,” that is, a phrase associated with this season.
by Neal Whitman, Poetry Prof
Yes, it might have been the year that the Gregorian Calendar was introduced and New Year’s Day was moved from April 1 to January 1. News traveled more slowly back then and folks who still got the day wrong were said to be fools.
A wonder of the Internet is that news travels today in nanoseconds. Another wonder is the ability to make friends we might never meet in person. Back in my school days in the 1950s, we had pen pals. A boy in Manitoba, Canada, and I exchanged a few letters and then it petered out when we could not think of much more to say once we got beyond who was in our families and where we went to school. Now I have “email-pals” all over the world, mostly poets. One of them is a poet in Australia, Lorin Ford [she said it would be okay to tell you her name]. She is a highly regarded haiku poet and has won many awards, so I feel lucky that she has time for me. Right now she is busy editing haiku for A Hundred Gourds [haikugourds@gmail.com]. A few months ago I asked her to recommend an anthology of Australian poetry to fill a gap in my home library. I took one of her suggestions and bought a used copy (on the Internet, of course!) – The Penguin Book of Australian Poetry edited by John Trantner and Philip Mead. In their Introduction, I read:
… in 1944 the figure of a hoax poet, ‘Ern Malley,’ appears on the scene – a ghostly presence designed to self-destruct and take Modernism with him into the void.
Malley’s poems were given fourteen pages in this not-quite-500 page tome. A-ha! A subject for my April 1 Poetry Prof feature. I profess: I like a good joke. Malley poems are in print and there is a book about the hoax, out of print. In the spirit of our Internet age, here I am going to rely in part on The Official Ern Malley Website recommended by Lorin: www.ernmalley.com.
The seeds for the hoax begin in 1940 when 19-year-old University of Adelaide student, Max Harris, founded a poetry journal, Angry Penguins. The title came from a Harris poem…
We know no mithridatum of despair as drunks, the angry penguins of the night, straddling the cobbles of the square tying a shoelace by fogged lamplight.
Two traditional poets, James McAuley and Harold Stewart, offended by the badness of the purported modernism here, thought it would a great gag to invent a modernist poet and submit wacko poems in his name. Thus, there in the autumn 1944 issue of Angry Penguins we first see the work of Ern Malley. The two culprits also were successful in getting Ern a book contract for Malley’s entire corpus, The Darkening Ecliptic. The jokesters, in fact, made Malley a corpse! They concocted a biography that Ernest Lalor Malley was born in Liverpool in 1918 and migrated as child to Australia with his parents and older sister, Ethel. He became an insurance salesman in Sidney and, after his death from Grave’s Disease in 1943, Ethel found this pile of his poems. McAuley and Stewart wrote to Harris, as Ethel, asking if he thought the stuff was any good.
Harris published Malley’s poems in Angry Penguins and wrote in tribute [grab a hanky, okay?] –
Ern Malley prepared for his death quietly confident that he was a great poet, and that he would be known as such. He prepared his manuscript to that end — there was no ostentation nor the exhibitionism of the dying in the act. It was an act of calm controlled confidence. He treated death greatly, and as poetry, while undergoing the most fearful and debilitating nervous strain that a human being could possibly endure.
The Adelaide Daily Mail got wind that it might all be a hoax – perps cannot help themselves – they leave clues and want to be found out. Harris hired a private dick, and soon the whole affair was exposed. Angry Penguins folded, but, in an act of defiance, Harris put out a new journal from 1951 – 1955, Ern Malley’s Journal, and re-published Malley poems! All seventeen poems appear in the Tranter and Mead anthology. These all are short poems and below is the Coda to “Colloquy with John Keats.”
We have lived as ectoplasm
The hand that would clutch
Our substance finds that his rude touch
Runs through him a frightful spasm
And hurls him back against the opposite wall
We know that there are three muses for poetry: Calliope for epic, Polythymnia for sacred, and Erato for love poetry. I wondered if there was a patron saint for poets. Answers.com answered: “If poetry has a patron saint, he’s been looking the other way lately.” Well, whether he or she is loafing, you would be a fool not to be able to take a good joke. Next month, let’s catch up on Malley’s two inventors. Preview: they were not one-trick ponies.
by Darla Himeles
Moist leaves in
after-rain
One turns the other
in sensual thrusts
They jolt above the sidewalk
sigh in thunderheartbeats
as they fall
one upon the other
By Joseph Milosch
I believe I have come back unfamiliar with the language of my trade. I try to remember where a handful of sand rolled down slope and water darkened earth until it sparkled gem-like. I try to recall the mornings when men focused their imagination on cut slopes, verticals, trenches and willed their backs, arms, and hands to build my country.
I drive down a street trying to recognize the intersection. I stop for a light and remember the stone mason, who broke from work twice a day to rinse old chew from his mouth. His three-fingered hand cradled the rock he chipped as he built Burkett’s milking barn.
It was my first job. I mixed concrete for him. I brought him rocks in a wheel barrow. I rolled a stone over my finger. The nail turned purple, blood leaked along its edges. I had a sliver I couldn’t find in my palm. It was the longest day of the year, the summer solstice.
Near sundown, we stopped and helped Burkett feed his stock. The mason said, “By the end of summer the days won’t be so hot and long.” The two of them laughed; then, I laughed because I realized it wasn’t going to get easier. I smelled water in the evening air as I watched his cows moaning for their metal mouthed-calves. I thought of my hands sweating in my blister’s heat. Up until then I didn’t know hands swelled from labor.
Burkett pointed to one cow, her udder swollen like a gooseberry in late August. He said, “She’s due in a couple of weeks,” and I learned dairy cows gave more milk if they gave birth every couple of years. The farmer said, “Wives are a lot like cows. To keep them happy, you got to give ‘em a child every once in a while”
That cow didn’t look happy as she drew with the aid of her lower lip a few grains into her mouth. The mason thought he was funny as he volunteered me to clean the pig sty, and I wished I was hiking along the road where corn leaves caught dust and bees left splintered trails as they walked across clover.
That was how it was. I came to find there was no dignity in work. There was comradeship. I learned in the trades, I could return years later to say, “I built that.” I came to believe it was good to walk among the cows in winter, as the corn froze in its crib. During these times, I thought I could feel the solid construction in the moist air dampened my chin. It was like feeling the cold in the stone, whose cut revealed the profile of a man’s face.
I rubbed my hand across the ridge under his eye, rubbed the chink in his lip. My hand moved as if it was drawn to the joint between stones. I enjoyed feeling the even space between rocks. I enjoyed feeling the smooth saw cut of the window sill where snow gathered like dirt on its glass. I enjoyed touching our work, as I watched cows standing in their own mist and looked at the wind, pushing snow under fences and around trees.
In the evening of the first day of summer, I park and raise my hand to shade my eyes from the sun. In the street, vapor strands rise from a manhole cover. They merge at a tree of steam. I remember the shade of the white ash tree as I washed trowels, floats, and shovels. I remember that three fingered mason. He laughed when I dropped a rock on my toe, hammered my thumb. My last day, he paid me, shook my hand, and said, “You’re not afraid of work.”
by Harold G Grimes III
Coldly human
a dramatization of heat
the noise the gossip the talk the trouble
all cheap
don’t speak
I feel it with my intelligence
the horror the nightmare the pain
the only real
we feel nothing
but cold.
by Neal Whitman
March Madness! For many of you, those words bring to mind how wild and woolly the weather can be. The calendar says “First Day of Spring,” but you are not ready to fold and put away the extra blanket you spread over the bed last November. For gamblers, March Madness means point spreads! They go a bit crazy when the basketball team they bet on did (or did not) beat the point spread. In our home, Elaine and I do have a friendly wager on the outcome of the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Oh, I do not get too crazy over winning or losing, but what is maddening is how it can take up to twenty minutes to play out the last one minute left on the game clock. Time is a mystery, eh?
living simply
is not a mystery
the first bud
by Dretta Grace White
Beauty
For a time
Seemed
Like a promise broken
An outstretched hand
Suddenly severed
At the wrist
It wasn’t true
The hand
Withdrew