the sonnet scroll xx

THE STREET WHERE YOU LIVED
By Bruce Bennett

I have often walked
Down the street before,
But the pavement always stayed
Beneath my feet before . . . .

I used to sing it as I walked along,
and one time you did actually appear,
out of the mist, emerging, real and clear,
as if you had been conjured by the song.
You were a Vision. I just stopped and stared.
I could not think of anything to say.
We walked together just a little way
before we parted. I was not prepared
to meet you then, embodied, on that street,
the presence who so occupied my thought.
I never once imagined we would meet
in such a mundane manner. I was caught
between two worlds, and forced to face the fact:
I chose the world where I didn’t have to act.


Copyright © 2020 by Bruce Bennett.

THE PRISONER
By Bruce Bennett

We thought that she was losing it for sure.
The way she acted. We were quite upset.
You know, those little signs you can’t ignore?
Distraction. How you’re muddled when you get
obsessed with something that you can’t express –
or won’t – to anyone? That’s how she was,
and we were worried, since we couldn’t guess
the reason. Well, we now know it’s because
they’d learned about his illness. She was sick
with grief, but he’d forbidden her to tell,
which was the way he was. So she was strick-
en dumb and plunged into her private Hell.
She fumbled and she bumbled, martyr to
collusive silence, chained to what she knew.


Copyright © 2020 by Bruce Bennett.

DUCK DIGNITY
By Bruce Bennett

I give her lettuce. She can barely move,
but manages to snatch it with her beak,
as if she still has something left to prove,
and wants that known, and lets her actions speak.
I am alive, they say. Her eyes are clear.
I’m what I always was, and I am strong.
And she will hiss if she thinks I’m too near.
Each time I’ve thought we’ve lost her I’ve been wrong.
I’m glad to be, but don’t want her to suffer.
And so I watch and wait, which suits us fine.
I still have lots of lettuce left to offer,
and sympathy, although it’s only mine.
She doesn’t need it, gesture, thought, or word.
She’ll take my lettuce though. A tough old bird.


Copyright © 2020 by Bruce Bennett

READERSHIP
By Bruce Bennett

My friend, a bookseller of high renown,
Announces he loves books that “do not sell,”
A situation those of us know well
Who write such books, and fulminate and frown
About the lack of readership for what
Should be of such great interest crowds should flock
And take their place in lines around the block
To shake the hands of those who wrote them. But
We know too well that such is not the case.
We do not fool ourselves. Obscurity
Is always there, and laughing in our face
For being trusting fools enough to be
Still hopeful that the thing we love to do
Will mean a thing to any but a few.


Copyright © 2020 by Bruce Bennett.

LADY WITH THE BOOK
By Michael Todd Steffen

Listen. It’s a painting. Her unworldly
eyes, they look as though they’ve been in
the fine print of this book since it was written.
The painter’s seen our infant Lord is hardly
the word in the beginning, rather unlordly
in his dismay. Although it’s not uncommon
even today for mothers and their children
to fall in with a book. The theme’s already
lasting in the sense that it transcends
the time of Botticelli. Surely he
sat reading with his mother in her lap
whose warmth nestled his body. In the mind’s
the reach between us, though. Her fingers keep
turning the pages. Look. Look there, she says. See?


Copyright © 2020 by Michael Todd Steffen.

DOWN JACKET
by Owen Doyle

Before our goodnight kiss, before the light
in his room goes out, our son’s bed-side fan
has to be on: its drone masking the night
sounds that creak, knock, groan, and threaten
shadowy harms beyond our explanation.
A steady wind will cut across his blanket,
repelling the ghouls of his imagination,
and he will zip up his green down jacket
all the way. “We’ll leave the light on here
in the hall. Good night. Sleep well.”
Shielded in green, he can rest his anxious head.
Our kiss does not betray our own dim fear:
a fear that won’t disturb our son until
he puts a child of his own to bed.


Copyright © 2020 by Owen Doyle.

AVIARY
by Owen Doyle

This lord proclaims his barnyard omnipotence
in a hail of down and feathered meteors,
his world beneath him as he crows, more
cock sure, more contemptuous of fences

than a condor, that empress of the air who keeps
her distance, presuming dominion over all
that she can see from far above, as she wheels
in silent circles well removed from the heaps

of stone, brick, steel and glass laid down
by our poor wingless species: we who strive
to lift our natures, to exalt ourselves,
who flail, fail, fall, and rise again,

with avid strokes, uneven, somewhere between
cocky flapping and the soaring of our dreams.


Copyright © 2020 by Owen Doyle.

THE ENGLISH TEACHER’S YEARLY TRIP
By Patricia Callan

        O! She doth teach the torches to burn bright.

Day one of school they stood outside her door.
Older sisters and brothers told how Brutus
schemed with friends who hid knives inside their sleeves.
Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods. . . .

Yorick’s skull made tough boys want to vomit.
Still, students begged her for a seat on the bus.
A high school student, I was deemed too old
to have a seat on the bus. Every year

my sister and brother had a seat on that bus
– reserved by the teacher who put her life on it,
taught me how to write a sonnet – our mother.

Now, in our home town, my sister meets
people who say, “Your mom was my teacher.
I got a seat on the bus.”


Copyright © 2020 by Patricia Callan.

EXIT
By Paul Chandler

Before she could say three cruel words, he leaves.
He’s gone. She rehearses them, and she leaves.

Spring was kind. It swept up the cold ice, and
In warm green waves recreated tree leaves.

Summer was too hot. Fall crept in nicely,
Waved red-yellow hands to those who see leaves.

The birds sought refuge from an ice cold air:
“Trees for sale: Choirs, ruined, bare. Free leaves!”

All too soon, Paul, winter’s coming to stay.
Fall’s a migrant who, when forced to flee, leaves.


Copyright © 2020 by Paul Chandler.

PARTIAL ECLIPSE
by Jay Wickersham

The TV and the papers gave us warning:
today the moon would swallow up our sun. He’d
stick in her throat, a too-large lump of candy,
and be coughed back up. It didn’t seem alarming,
to lose our sun. We talked of it while we sat,
then settled to work. The phones rang. Visitors came
for a meeting, stayed through lunch. The sky turned black
and thundery, spattered the glass with rain.
“What a storm,” we said. “So dark – it looks like nightfall.”    
Headlights burrowed through the roadside gloom.
So dark, so dark inside our narrow room.
Only when light’s return made day less doubtful
did we begin to wonder: was this sun
still ours, or another, lesser sun?


Copyright © 2020 by Jay Wickersham.

MY MAGIC POND
By David Landon

There’s history, and then there is this pond,
deep with illusion, as if a glimpse of sky
had fallen to infinity down there.

The fish, a school of tiny orange ones,
are darting through their bit of cosmic blue,
among the fluent images of trees,

their ludic bodies quick, then very still,
then quick again, then quick and quick and quick,
obedient to the impulse of their dance.

Impulsively, I speak their magic name,
with my whole body saying, “fish, fish, fish,”
as if it were imperative for “live.”

And now I’m swimming in the cosmos too,
inscribing ludic phonemes in my brain.


Copyright © 2020 by David Landon.

A LATE LOVE POEM
By David Landon

       “For in that sleep of death,
          what dreams may come.”    Hamlet

Today – or let’s pretend – we’re walking through
the mystery of here, for instance, here,
under November’s newly antlered trees,
our feet pressing the earth, shuffling the leaves,
their gold and copper specificities,
their amber, lemon, mauve varieties
their scattered, gnarling multiplicities,
crisping and brilliant in the late day sun,
the air so pure, this place so radiant,
you’d almost think that history had lost
its way, and left us here to find our own,
pressing the earth with soft, attentive feet,
and holding hands, mysteriously here,
almost as if we’d died, and chose our dream.


Copyright © 2020 by David Landon.

AT GIVERNY
By David Landon

It’s late, Monet. I’m drinking Armagnac,
and walking through the mist at Giverny.
It’s on my desktop here, and like a ghost,
I’m floating through the screen among these trees,
trees weightless as their image in the Seine,
silver, and mauve, and rose. I see your ghost,
Monet, painting there by the lily pond,
dissolving everything into your dream.
If nature dreams, perhaps this is the world
it wills to be, inhabited by ghosts
with weightless souls, and nothing else to do
but lose their way and softly disappear
in all this swirl of rose, and mauve, and blue,
becoming mist, suffused with silver light.


Copyright © 2020 by David Landon.

PLAN FOR TODAY
By David Landon

       “Let us look for him everywhere.” Montaigne
                           To Philosophize is to Learn to Die

It’s Tuesday and I’m doing what you said,
Montaigne, today and all the other days,
keeping in mind the tricks of you know who.

We know he’s somewhere out there now,
disguised as Nature, whipping up a storm,
softening hills, turning the world to mud;

or he’s some harmless guy, limping along,
clutching his cane, staring at everyone,
his thoughts invisible, and razor swift.

You’re right, Montaigne, he could be in this room,
a shadow in the corner of the eye,
gone when you turn to look, but still right there,

lurking beyond the surfaces of touch,
smiling, thinking, watching, biding his time.


Copyright © 2020 by David Landon.

TURNS 
by Terese Coe

In Hungary, aunts and cousins disappeared.
This kindled in her consciousness a fire
that even living the wrongs, you may have no rights.
A child has ears to hear. She’s not a cipher:
children sense the depths that others suffer.
The words she’d overheard became the nightmares
besetting her through childhood with the terror
that she was seeing day, but day was night.
 
She grew to be a First Amendment lawyer,
juxtaposing balances and stores
of memory and fact, the law, the wars,
laying out each injustice through the day,
imposing logic, and seeing an ultimate order.
As long as she could write, she found her way.  


Copyright © 2020 by Terese Coe.

RETROGRADE
by Terese Coe

Now countermarch upon the backward road
from hip-hop to Garcia to the ode,
then on to the chant, the drum, the savage spew.
Hark! It’s Capulet and Montague,
convulsed by love, alienated, whipped,
about to swallow poison in a crypt.

Then hear the crash of fallen Xanadu,
the wails of the young Elektra on the shore
when Iphigenia sailed, and came no more.
The Mysteries of soma and seduction,

the massacre, the tribe, the fatal abduction,
wobble back and forward, a meandering queue.
Predators morph into tragic mountebanks
as history devolves to ones and blanks.


Copyright © 2020 by Terese Coe.

GYPSY SONG 
by Terese Coe

We stumbled upon them,
the Hesperides apples,
the Hippocrene foam,

and sang of the pyramids’
crawlspace for plunder,
stele and obelisk
open to thunder,

plague of the bandits
in battlement sand,
canyon and carapace,
the road to Samarkand.  


Copyright © 2020 by Terese Coe.

ALL OCCUPATION
By Marcia Karp

She knew it was love – the twitch of arrival,
the twinge on departure, hours with his name
on the flesh of her tongue. Nothing the same
since she’d met him. Accepting no rival
who’d love her, her new love’s survival
was all occupation. She must stay aflame,
for he had no part of it, never came
to her dead lips for his own lips’ revival.

So long she kept love for that time-marking man.
Kept it so well that she mastered the art
and dared to discount him. Then new love began –
the twitches and twinges now messily real
to a man who made room in his heart
for a love that was sure to be far from ideal.


Copyright © 2020 by Marcia Karp.

CREATION AND CREMATION,
               ONE-HALF THE EQUATION
by James B. Nicola

But soul to soul, we have no limitations –
age, space, time, death, &c. Doesn’t “Soul”
mean What Can’t Be Contained? These conversations
(replete with syllogistic folderol)
can serve this Soul (this Self, you see) to you
in a limited, unlimited way,
the major variables being two:
not x, but u; + What I Want to Say –
my v, mysterious albeit penned
to be dispensed that 1 day u may know it
in bits, when i am ash, or smithereens,
through yellowed words and silences, opened
like Pandora’s casket, or a can of beans,
or gutted notes from a long gutted poet.


Copyright © 2020 by James B. Nicola.

ON PROMISES
by James B. Nicola

You do not have to say I promise. Just
say what you’re going to do and do it. Or
don’t say, just do it. Words, once uttered, are
as light and inconsequential as dust

on a rising current. The deed’s the thing;
the promise, vapor-scented, certainly,
but transient, temporal. So call on me –
Why not? Likewise, I might give you a ring

one day. Might not. What do you mean, you want
me to promise? Do you promise to answer,
or return the call if I leave my number
on your voicemail? I’m glad, but what’s the point
of promises? Just – see you later. When?
Don’t know yet. But (I promise) you’ll know then.


Copyright © 2020 by James B. Nicola.

LESSER EVIL
by James B. Nicola

I’ve blessed the lesser evil. Is it not
Survival? Is this not what We all do,
Then criticize the Other’s lesser blessings
And kill for differences? So leave me now:
What you call squalor, centuries have strived
For. Let me be at peace with the content
Of better less, and whole powerlessness,
As far as what I can’t control’s concerned,
To wallow, as you say, in the superiority
Of little, the supremacy of nothing:
So like the gods you cannot hear who shout
– I read their faces with humility;
So like true love, which should find happiness
Even in a scraggly hermitage.


Copyright © 2020 by James B. Nicola.

GRAY 1
by James B. Nicola

If you could make a person of a gray
day, firmly grasp her face and kiss away
her gray, then you could make a balmy day
out of a gray. Imagine, though, how brave
you’d have to be trying this with a twister.
You’d have to be part soldier and part knave,
a strongman/roué, to make her behave.
And you couldn’t really practice with your sister.

Not that a day’s “female” – I’d never say
that weather is a woman, or a day’s
meant to be coddled, kissed, or tamed at all.

But often, in a mask of thick gray haze
or unforeseen hail, sleet, snow, or rainfall,
I think of one, having one of her days.


Copyright © 2020 by James B. Nicola.

WIND
By B. E. Stock

A whining machine chomped the tar off the road
And a boy howled in the cellar;
Someone kept knocking on a door somewhere,
But no one answered, and finally it opened
And slammed against the wall.
A motor revved, then quieted, then revved again,
And a big load poured down a chute again and again.

I woke, and it was just a wind
Such as I thought blew only on the tundra
Somewhere in Siberia during the winter.
Stormless, it raged against trees and houses,
Banging on trash cans, tossing power lines,
Keeping me awake with its restless breath,
And I waited for a message, but heard none.


Copyright © 2020 by B. E. Stock.

FIELD OF WIND
By Kathleen Kirk

       Why this field of wind? —Verl
       Fall Back Down When I Die, by Joe Wilkins

Somewhere I read that we cannot see
landscapes out windows in dreams,
but I looked out on layers of water,
gray and dark blue, deep green,
and a deeper gray. It might have been
a field of wind, that’s true, not water,
a landscape built from another phrase
from a book, or it might have been
layers of grass in Australia, or layers
of paint in an imaginary country
on the wall. But I’m sure I walked
on that shore, and found it familiar,
a place known but never seen before.


Copyright © 2020 by Kathleen Kirk.

HOPE CHEST
By Kathleen Kirk

It’s made of cedar, raw inside,
polished outside. Hinged drawers
hang from the opened lid, holding
small things: silk scarves, lace doilies,
linen napkins, handkerchiefs.
Underneath are sweaters
made of thick wool, folded,
a lace tablecloth, stacked finery.

Where is it now? This cedar chest?
What’s happened to all this hope?


Copyright © 2020 by Kathleen Kirk.

HOW IT GOES
by Joanne Joseph

Not even twenty
Young, green
 

Fled the parent nest
 

Right there he was
In college writing class
 

Brilliant, warm, funny,
Loving  


Me blind to brewing psychic ills

 
Soon saving self in quick divorce  


I did not, could not save him,

Just myself


Copyright © 2020 by Joanne Joseph.

DEAR HEART
By CammyThomas

For decades, I’ve vibrated to your banging,
        your arrhythmic tympani.
Every day I worry.
                (wishing will not make us well)

        My Greek cardiologist quotes Homer,
commands me to live without fear,
                then implants a monitor in my breast.

        I can’t see it, but I can feel it –
                        (wishing will not make us well)
                a short metal warning under the skin,
clocking each syncopated beat.

        My friend J. died in a moment, despite
                his perfect EKGs and happy life.
“Wait,” his wife heard him say –.


Copyright © 2020 by Cammy Thomas.

THE RITUAL BATH
By Joyce Wilson

        – In memory of our dearest friends

1. The Date

The calendar was hanging by the stair.
They chose the date like other dates to mark
The progress of their lives, with time to spare
And space to celebrate, then disembark.

She liked to be of use, and in control,
Was happiest when busying about
The centers and peripheries her role
Assumed, although she now had cause for doubt.

For now that he determined that his end
Was near, and nothing more would come to pass,
It seemed that time transformed, as if the bend
In waves had loosed, and he would start the fast.

The moments rose and carried them as they
Reached up and threw the calendar away.