AMONG THE ISOBARS
By Chris Wallace-Crabbe
What sort of weather plays across the soul?
Thought, in cold bedrooms, congeals again
smudging the window-pane. Like paradox
we wrestle with the what of what-is-not
while early-woken hoons burn rubber
up and down the dove-grey street outside.
The colour of your thought has no clear name
or else it had a name and you forgot—
amethyst? mauve? lapis lazuli?—
the nether mind can often be subversive,
just like that low moving in with scattered showers.
You battle on, take an umbrella, sing
the sweet and corny songs of adolescence.
Fortune tends to favour the south-west wind
Copyright © 2009 by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
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FIRESTORM
By Chris Wallace-Crabbe
The bushfires rant around our draggled town
Disintegrating some bloke in his house
And broiling others, where sedans broke down
Blindly. All blackened, from wombat to mouse.
That moment screamed in, rumoured to be like
Four Lockheeds or Rolls Royces in your head.
If you still have a head, now. The melted bike
Squats on the ash: one charger for the dead?
Nature must lack the chivalry we could sniff
As brotherly tribute: something has turned out worse
With Plato’s cave become a blazing cliff;
Pain is the knot-hole in our universe
And yet the black calligraphy of trees
Can make this long view elegantly Chinese.
Copyright © 2009 by Chris Wallace-Crabbe
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CHANGE OF TUNE
By Paul Christian Stevens
Ah Muse, you have inspired me rather too well
To lines interrogating your dire absence,
Analyses of separation’s hell,
Laments for this unscalable dead silence—
You’ve given me such good material
For bleak pentameters of disconnection,
For sonnets of abandonment, and all
My Canzoniere’s amorous dejection.
But really—how much trouble would it take
To factor in some elegant variation?
What if, Dear Muse, just say for argument’s sake,
You switched the content of my inspiration
Changing my tune from a dull, tedious ache
To paeans of ecstatic consummation?
Copyright © 2009 by Paul Christian Stevens
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ABSENT DEITY
By Paul Christian Stevens
[T]he wolf and the wild dog that have come in to the fire
find their gods in the living flesh, solid to the touch, occupying
earth-space. —Jack London, White Fang
I crept in from the wilderness of wraiths
To find my god a god of burning power,
Flesh hot to taste, hands spinning living fire
Consuming me with love: no act of faith
Needed to love her mystery or her wrath;
No effort of will could posit disbelief:
Her presence palpable; her absence, grief;
Her voice a paradise; her silence, death.
An absent deity is silence. Ants
Labour in myriad silence. The flower breaks
In silence. Song is air sighing through she-oaks,
My breath is love for her woven from silence.
She is my Muse in presence or in absence,
I am her poet always, singing the silence.
Copyright © 2009 by Paul Christian Stevens
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AUTO-DA-FÉ
By Paul Christian Stevens
My mind, to prove you’re out of reach for me,
Sets artful syllogisms, well-deployed:
And yet an existential fallacy
Renders sophisticated logic void
In premising proximity’s required
For validation of the colloquy
Between two souls, who as one soul, inspired,
Transmute brute absence into poetry:
Thus logic transubstantiates to faith;
Hard evidence, refuted, must resign—
My trust in you is exigent as breath:
For what’s my choice? To see you as benign
Muse, or grim executor of grief?
Which hurts me more: belief, or disbelief?
Copyright © 2009 by Paul Christian Stevens
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THE PAVEMENT ARTIST
By Paul Christian Stevens
For love, the pavement artist drew her face
All over the sidewalk, dozens of different ways
That caught each nuance of her mystery,
In riffs of skill even untrained eyes could see,
Though when the lady sauntered gaily by
Chatting to friends, or gazing up at the sky,
Or window-shopping, she walked unknowingly through
The portraits he so intricately drew—
Her feet lost in the myriad feet that race
Foot after blind foot at a smartish pace
With hectic antics quick-quick-stepping away
Lickety-split across the city day
Erasing her lineaments without a trace,
Scuffing the pavement back to standard grey.
Copyright © 2009 by Paul Christian Stevens
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CLEOPATRA’S NEEDLES
By Anna Evans
It’s not as if she sewed a stitch, the spoiled
Empress, but her obelisks, though blunt,
draw a thread through several continents
of mine. Visiting London, as a child,
I walked the Embankment for what felt like miles
to where the sphinxes flanked the monument;
at eighteen I did Paris sans argent,
much later I toured Central Park in style.
How we appropriate these ancient glories,
standing in front of them for photographs,
as if their hieroglyphics told our stories!
Here’s one of me: I shade my eyes and laugh,
as self-involved as any scheming Queen
their silent testament has ever seen.
Copyright © 2009 by Anna Evans
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COLLUSION
By Anna Evans
As humans we are prone to animate,
to notice faces in the cloudy sky,
and cities flickering in the fiery grate.
The brain condones the whimsy of the eye.
Then, when we search for something we have lost,
we comb the same rooms over and over again,
refuse the evidence, at any cost.
The eye condones the whimsy of the brain.
Perhaps these two are much like boyhood friends—
sensible apart, together they
inevitably come to foolish ends,
egging each other on that childish way.
Believe what you can touch. It seems to me
naïve to trust a single thing we see.
Copyright © 2009 by Anna Evans
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IN OTHER NEWS (A LOVE POEM)
By Anna Evans
While hundreds perish daily in Iraq,
eruptions drive Columbians from the South,
and in Wisconsin skaters fall through cracks,
I should not be obsessed by how your mouth
feels touching mine. Gas prices and pollution
are up, unlike our exports or Free Trade.
The White House chisels at the constitution
and talks of overturning Roe v Wade.
We know November ponds are treacherous
till Winter hardens them in proper season,
yet someone’s always falling through the ice
while other things break down for no good reason.
Turn off the TV; let the paper lie.
Kiss me before we give up, or worse, die.
Copyright © 2009 by Anna Evans
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SONNET ON A LINE FROM STAR WARS
By Anna Evans
My heart is being opened and this kiss
will not become a scar—so Jedi Knights
admit they’re prone to love’s galactic heights
and troughs, but look, although it’s corny, this
is something we had once that I now miss.
From forty on it seems we dropped our sights
to screen romances, and gave up our rights
to passion for their digital abyss.
Yet why should I accept love losing color
like old films do, when I’ve not stopped feeling
anger in middle age? Nor has some healing
visual opiate made pride grow duller.
I’d slip into a bitter dotage, but
I’m holding out for the Director’s cut.
Copyright © 2009 by Anna Evans
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DYLAN THOMAS
By David Castleman
This was no madly blessed auld Keltic bard
so pathologically alcoholic
and frighteningly apart in his heart
of hearts, denied love’s enlightening tonic.
Neither was he a bard learned and sage
nor a god-like boy with one golden voice,
nor robbed his youth to fortify his age
because his blood flowed cold and without noise.
He wasn’t one of those randy blackguards
conceived as lightning stung some leech-swum swamp,
whose mystical affinity for words
mantled a grim heroism in pomp.
He was undemocratic and a poet
and laughed with horror, and a droll wit.
Copyright © 2009 by David Castleman
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IF THE LATIN AP DIES—
By David Johnson
Latin will become another Priam,
Girding his shaky loins for one last fight,
Awaiting the slaughter at the altar—
By order of the AP College Board.
Latin will be another sad poet
Trapped in Tomi, where no one knows his tongue,
Sending out gloomy messages unheard
By the unfeeling AP College Board.
You men and women of learning and light!
Nunc est non bibendum! Time now to fight!
Not arms, but give all the money you can.
Don’t ever let them say: “Wasn’t there once
A Latin AP? Ah, yes, but fuit—
Like Troy, it was set ablaze and then gone.”
Copyright © 2009 by David Johnson
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SIMON’S SONNET
By David Landrum
My wealth cannot remove the scars that say
I am unclean. Though they’re not festering sores,
the red splotches my hands and face display
the priests call leprosy—and so the doors
into the Temple and the synagogue
are shut to me because of them. I shout,
Unclean! Unclean!—my only dialogue
with those I walk among when I go out.
My guest, this teacher, has expected me
to greet him with a kiss. Yet he must know
the Law: if I but touch him he will be
defiled and guilty of the marks I show.
A man of learning, firm in his belief,
should not carry my sin nor bear my grief.
Copyright © 2009 by David Landrum
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SNOW WHITE, IN MIDDLE AGE:
TO HER STEP-MOTHER
By Shaune Bornholdt
So sleek! I’d watch you preen, the inward curve
beneath your rounded cheek an elegance
like indrawn breath, parenthesis of chance
encounter’s smile. You knew how you deserved
men’s craving eyes. The mirror’s liquid swerve
of light reflected on your ritual dance
of making up. Those lips! That sidewise glance.
I coveted your neck, your style, your nerve.
Now slack, my softening flesh has lost the line
of grace and coquetry I’d imitate,
uninnocent, ambitious, in that place
where envious loves collided to define
the fear I now know, and would mitigate.
Break through the mirror. Let me touch your face.
Copyright © 2009 by Shaune Bornholdt
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CRACK THE WHIP
By Shaune Bornholdt
The fourth grade bullies made good use of Jack.
Bulbous, witless, huge, three times retained,
As heavy as a tractor, he could crack
The whip-line of those kids and get them brained
On rocks at recess. Last in line was worst.
If head and middle held, the tail would fly
Pell-mell downhill. Full stop! Then sudden burst
Of force, the last child flung, the victors’ cry.
One girl, the tail on every run, was bloodied
Near daily, yet she never left the game.
She lied about the bruises as she studied
The rules of in and out. A new boy came.
Jill made that pale asthmatic fool her friend,
Joined hands and lined up, second from the end.
Copyright © 2009 by Shaune Bornholdt
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TIME TO REBOOT
By Nancy Bailey Miller
We’ve lost the privacy of phone booths now:
the cell phone rings in restaurants and subway
stations. How I miss the closed glass door of pay
phones, dread the interruptions as I vow
no flip phone talk in Suburus. A second
meddler in the year two thousand nine
is omnipresent ear buds which incline
us now to isolate ourselves. Reckon
instead with mockingbirds on evening walks;
listen as the breeze disturbs the willow. Hear
green peepers trading news in swampy reeds.
Turn off technology to notice hawks.
Reboot your brain with silence—let it clear.
Study the complexity of weeds.
Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Bailey Miller
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TERRACED STEPS
By Nancy Bailey Miller
Near Kamakura, noodle soup; I forgo
tempura. A shrine invites me from the feast.
I face the west on terraced steps, released
to hospitality of silence. Buddhas know
my need; there is in stone an echelon
of Buddha faces—some wear knit red hats.
My Tokyo hosts explain the custom: That’s
A shrine to the unborn—aborted, gone.
Too strong a verb for me—abort. Eyes fill,
throat closes as I look to the Pacific.
Last week my daughter lost her third, a gene
responsible. But my abortion . . . Will
it always be a cloudy loss? No quick
decision ever, hats for those unseen.
Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Bailey Miller
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A FABRIC LEFT BEHIND
By Nancy Bailey Miller
I lost the view when rhododendron bushes
grew for twenty years. First, children loose as
little league teams in fall wound up like tiny
tap shoes laced with curling grosgrain ribbon.
Daisies hugged the mailbox, swirled with fox
grape vine, and always full of heating bills
and valentines. I lost the longer view as
rhododendron grew, and I forgot to plant
the old placentas near the wall. And then
the children’s father made a swing, spar varnished,
twisted hemp attached to maple branches—
sheets of sunshine. Cartwheels, backyard ballet,
ripe tomatoes tied to stakes. But muslin strips untie—
they fall. And I forgot to plant placentas near the wall.
Copyright © 2009 by Nancy Bailey Miller
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SPRING SONNET
By Kathleen Kirk
Spring without you.
I am back inside
my own heart.
Yesterday the children
broke the blooming columbine. I brought
one tall stem indoors to place in a black
bottle, some forgotten wine. The doves
are a dark red; gold, the inner star.
I do not know if my blood is at peace,
what my soul is, or if it is shining.
Ask me about regret, whether I am
broken.
What can I tell you?
Nothing.
Copyright © 2009 by Kathleen Kirk
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REGRET
By Lee Evans
“O how I dreamed of things impossible!”
I know that I have read that line somewhere,
But cannot cite the author, nor take care
To do so. Since the sentiment is full
Of contrarieties that I have willed,
I have the right to make those words my own.
The dream that lay as heavy as a stone
Upon my breast all night lies flung, crumpled,
Like bed clothes cast aside.
I am awake,
Astonished at myself for the desire
That blazed and raged within me for your sake—
But no: ‘twas for myself that I aspired.
And what you were to me, my God had made
Out of my rib, that Love might be my slave.
Copyright © 2009 by Lee Evans
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SOME SECRET GARDEN
By Lee Evans
To us the winter’s end is signified
By hylas croaking from the budding trees,
Their song like sleigh bells, after having climbed
From hibernation underneath the leaves
And broken branches toward the starry heights,
With vocal sacs swelled up with evening air.
Their chorus chants of those romantic nights
That you and I remember, when our care
Was for some secret garden and embrace,
Where what we called our flesh and blood would mime
The circuit of the Soul, and breathe a trace
Of what we were once ere we pulsed through Time.
We dream this in the ice of our repose,
Our sleigh bells frozen underneath the snow.
Copyright © 2009 by Lee Evans
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AUTUMN ENCOUNTERS
By Tracey Gratch
Ninety-three hums near by with vitality
As I rake leaves tossed from another’s elm,
Observing, none grow here within my realm—
A challenge to my hospitality.
Each autumn brings the same formality:
Above the concrete wall, a current weaves
Soliloquies of cars and rushing leaves
Into a commonplace banality.
I take small comfort knowing I might share—
With passers-by and neighbors as they walk
Their dogs or kids for exercise or air—
Odd trivialities, complaints, small talk.
I’ll never rake another leaf; I swear;
Then someone waves from half-way down the block.
Copyright © 2009 by Tracey Gratch
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CATS, DOGS, AND PHILOSOPHERS
By Gail White
The cat is mistress in a new mink stole.
The dog, a clown who begs you for a drink.
Freedom to chase the dream of being whole
Is love, so Plato said. The dog might think
That you and you alone complete his soul.
The cagey cat will calculate the link
With what she needs and what she can control.
Cat writes her love with invisible ink.
Dog love is meek, but feline love is tough.
Cat thinks you’ll do, although she might look higher.
Dog never thinks he’s being loved enough,
His heart a quivering nodule of desire.
How true it is that we need dogs, and that
We’re beggars of affection from the cat.
Copyright © 2009 by Gail White
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ON THE LOSS OF A RING
By Joyce Wilson
This job was not the first request I sought
But was an interview I sought to get.
I climbed the stair and went up to the desk
Where no one sat. I ducked into the back
Hall chamber, taking off the ring for safe
Keeping. I put it on the shelf. When I
Returned, the woman at the desk said I
Could start as a cashier without delay.
The ring was gone, forgotten on the shelf,
And no one brought it to the Lost-and-Found.
The antique setting held an onyx stone,
A polished darkness that I longed to know,
A mystery, a promise I forsook
All for a job I knew I would not keep.
Copyright © 2009 by Joyce Wilson
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MURAL
By Eleanor Cory
I long to shout, “I love you most of all.”
The rush of rivals censors me. I halt
and lock my words inside, as I recall
how praise for others triggers my assault.
I gather models: lovers, mentors, friends,
who sit before my easel, each discrete.
The Mural of Encounters never ends.
I start to paint strong colors, then retreat
as competition’s black distorts the scheme
shadowing the hues with ancient hurts.
I turn. The colors surface and redeem
the treasured contact which each face asserts.
The mural clears, expands in breadth and length,
as each re-enters loved at fullest strength.
Copyright © 2009 by Eleanor Cory
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GEORGIA O’KEEFFE
By Eleanor Cory
When days unhook the garment of my powers
exposing naked yearning for relief,
I turn with hope to paintings of O’Keeffe
to wrap me in the bodies of her flowers.
I want her gliding hands and brush’s strokes
to swirl me in their paintings like a dance.
I ask for instant rescues in advance.
Instead I’m poisoned, stuck in coughs and chokes.
Pinks turn to blood, and pastel grays to caves.
The stems, macabre genitals, unseal
a closer look, as lines begin to feel
like pounding thrusts of thunderous ocean waves.
She takes my innocence with strokes of paint,
then frees me from the shackles of restraint.
Copyright © 2009 by Eleanor Cory
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HARMONY
By Eleanor Cory
The harmony of music works with deft
instructions from the ear. A chord is taught
to bond with others on its right and left.
Musicians choose connections, smooth or fraught
with tension. Alone, a chord holds little weight;
it needs fixed rules to mingle and contend
with melody. Its placement can create
a loss, great love or honor with its blend.
I savor chords inside me when, alone,
I move between two people who are close
and seek to mix, connect to both. I own
the music, but feel shy and can’t impose,
until I choose the right chord, note by note,
and find harmonic union once remote.
Copyright © 2009 by Eleanor Cory
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