Jeff

Fourth Time

's a charm they say
no matter where it is
no matter what the day
in a church on the hill
her name might be Jill
you're hell bent on this
sealed with a kiss
this time it will work
you won't be a jerk
you'll be superman
and eat marzipan
by the light of the moon
to the past to the ruin
while the ink runs to blood
where the blood turns to mud
and the mud turns to sand
and you take her little hand
forget all the ones 
before her

tip the glass to the past
tie yourself to the mast
leave this friendship to die
in the wind.

Debbie Calverley

Rosa

prohibition and burning bras

burning books and burning

schools, an old black woman

at the front of a bus rides out

chaos while the world hangs

itself waiting.  

Debbie Calverley

A True Poet - 1000 Kisses Deep

Too Far

Too far too deep he said

closer than you think she said

nobody notices he said

as she gazed at him adoringly

across a padded room in a bar

full of virtual strangers

working around the clock

he runs circles between sea and land

as time swims by in schools of fish

silver in sunlight glint

of her casual smile she throws

his way on rainy days

his umbrella inside out

in the wind on the bridge

so annoying this inside out

metal branches against glass

toss and turn away from sky

that could have held them in

such brief suspension

Debbie Calverley

There is No Word (Thanks Beebs)

There Is No Word
By Tony Hoagland
 
 

There isn’t a word for walking out of the grocery store

with a gallon jug of milk in a plastic sack

that should have been bagged in double layers

—so that before you are even out the door

you feel the weight of the jug dragging

the bag down, stretching the thin

plastic handles longer and longer

and you know it’s only a matter of time until

bottom suddenly splits.

There is no single, unimpeachable word

for that vague sensation of something

moving away from you

as it exceeds its elastic capacity

—which is too bad, because that is the word

I would like to use to describe standing on the street

chatting with an old friend

as the awareness grows in me that he is

no longer a friend, but only an acquaintance,

a person with whom I never made the effort—

until this moment, when as we say goodbye

I think we share a feeling of relief,

a recognition that we have reached

the end of a pretense,

though to tell the truth

what I already am thinking about

is my gratitude for language—

how it will stretch just so much and no farther;

how there are some holes it will not cover up;

how it will move, if not inside, then

around the circumference of almost anything—

how, over the years, it has given me

back all the hours and days, all the

plodding love and faith, all the

misunderstandings and secrets

I have willingly poured into it.

Go Fish

Like a bad relationship the fish flopped

gasped in the bottom of the pail

until I couldn’t stand it anymore -

dumped him overboard

pail and all.

Debbie Calverley

Wander

What we don't know we don't know,
so accept it. If your mother wandered

when your father was stationed in France
during the war before you were born,

before you were even conceived, so be it.
No matter what her sister told you

years later, after your mother died,
what does this matter now?

Your job anyway is to be the daughter,
to stay open to where you are,

your ear toward the glistening insects
that draw your eye to the wild azaleas

pushing their pale pink selves out of
the limestone ledge just over the edge

of the bluff where your house sits.
What you don't know

you will never know. Look instead
at the fluttering pink blossoms, at the lichen

stuck to the limestone ledge beneath them.
Look at the pale thumbprint of the moon

in the pale afternoon sky. The house is nearly
empty now, nearly no longer yours—

tables and chairs sold, couches and beds
given away, trash dumped, books and dishes

boxed and stacked for the truck
that's on its way. Everything is somewhere

else now, intact or scattered. It doesn't matter.
More than once your father wrote

from the field hospital about the nurses.
What was it like to read those letters?

These insects must be honeybees heavying
with nectar—so many lifting in and out

of the wild azaleas you can almost smell their
desire. Wild like your mother's may have been.

Like your husband's was. But you don't know
anything. You can sit on the porch

of this emptying house and think
whatever you think. You never apologized

for your own lies. Your husband apologized
too much. Even then the moon slept on its side,

its good ear deep in its pillow:
Your job was to be the wife and mother,

the daughter. To be whatever you are now.
The moon has its own job. The house

will fill again. Perhaps you are tired
of watching the bees. Of noticing how

the petals of the azaleas strain upward
to right themselves after the bees

have finished with them. Tired
of the questions that repeat themselves

like the fat predictable moon, and the doubt
that manages, no matter what the truth is,

to never run out.

Andrea Hollander

When the Winter Ghosts Depart

They leave slowly, as if reluctant to go

or unsure when the time is right, like travelers

who can’t decide which books to pack, the long

        Russian novel they’ve been struggling to finish

or the new one about cerebral werewolves, its firm hard binding

bright on the shelf promising a new kind
of death.

Where ice has leeched deep down into soil, they move

slowly, wading through dirt and loosened stones

        but where the symphony of roots has bound them

in a coil of growth they hesitate, caught
up in the coming storm of leaf and branch and flower.

Sometimes they slip away

in pairs, lovers

        from an old film, long, gray coats and a fedora

slanting out into sullen wind.

I have heard them whispering in a taxi or jogging

        to catch a plane, weaving

through moving walkways, spilling

        coffee from Styrofoam cups, committed

to the journey
now, willing to open the welcoming gate.

        And I have known them to dig down into fence posts

grip the wood in their devils’ teeth
pour their sinuous, frozen bodies into clinging pools of wet cement.

Sometimes vague taste of spring catches in their throats, a warm

fist, a warning in the dire air, a syncopation

        of ice

turning to rain, pelting the windows with slippery

        lozenges, loosening a hard grip on muted and tentative grass.

by Steve Klepetar

Everyone

dies (semi-colon)
Amy Winehouse, my grandmother

even the Son of God.

Every death should mark

a holy day

a wonderment

and suddenly you find yourself

eyes fixed on the ceiling

with a bruised knee

wondering what -

all the self-fuss 
was ever about.

"This love is like a drop in the ocean

Take this Heart and make it break"

U2  -Yaweh

to build a temple there
without floor, roof candle bed
mind into window

spit image, means to some end
in echelon ion
where ladder = knuckle

why knot thus: so as
upon a time once phoenix in fact
halcyon elude hatchet

“in this yard
—you could break your neck
looking at a star”
        —Ronald Johnson, out of “ARK 70, Arches IV” (ARK, 1996)

I Fell For

The big gesture

talk of friendship

clandestine hand offering
shakes in the dark

all the phone calls

sand-scrawled letters

such blue sky eyes

your worn chair in shadows

all the comings

goings

all the understandings

misunderstandings

over all the miles

mixed up years

slanted horizons

various pets, spouses

I bought it all
my head in the dream sands
with a hand full

of small change

Bobby

The Pains of Being Pure at Heart

Bjork

Necessity Defense of Institutional Memory

So the free may remain free
     say the nightmare is
     the dream
so we are preserved
     he who believes takes a life
so a life may be saved
     the girl becomes an object
so the greatest devastation occurs
     let go her fingers    their slim cleave
so I may be replaced
by a machine    which in its violence    behaves
more like me
     the longer you live    the more these lies
     come alive
so the past splits in two:
     one stays in the past and dies
one past shapeshifts    walks with you.

CAMILLE RANKINE

An Old Star

An old star ripped a new hole

glared out from its peek-a-boo

curtain as if to say the audience

was too young and shallow to witness

such a surprise performance.

“Such a predictable thing”

we heard the stars chatter

“this sequel of earthly events.”

- Debbie Calverley

Kyrielle

29 ways to stay creative

Fifty People One Question

He Could Have Been

a truck driver.  Bono.

I'm just saying.

An ordinary guy in sunglasses
and a leather jacket

filling his truck with gas

under the bright yellow canopy

marked Shell.

He stands like he owns the joint

chin at a cocky angle

as if to say

bring it on.

The glasses hiding his real

smile 

an eye grin that speaks his joy

of the open road.

I wonder if he's on the road as much

as a rock star

if he sings while he drives

if his wife takes out the garbage

if his kids really know him

like he knows the road.

The light turns green

I've been staring.

He licks his lips

flashes a peace sign

as I pull away

reflected in the mirror

of his big black shades.

- Debbie Calverley

My Apocalypse

My Apocalypse

A woman writes to ask
how far along I am
with my apocalypse.
What will you give me
if I tell?
An origami fish
made from a dollar bill.
After the apocalypse,
we will all be in a band.
We will understand each other
perfectly.
             *
"It's alright" and
"It doesn't matter."
Let "it" stand
for nothing.
             *
A weathered, fleshy bicyclist
wearing bunny ears
and a tie-dyed shirt
says "Zoom"
as she coasts past

Rae Armantrout

We amuse ourselves in repetition. One desire or another
      leads to self-hypnosis, the dazed
      critics in sensual display.
             And yet love streams across the open towers
where I wait, holed up in a question of mourning while the litigation proceeds,

-- Gene Frumkin, from "Blueprint for a New Planet," Hambone 18

On Love Poems

On Love Poems
 
I'd like to write a poem in which
the hero with the lazy eye
falls close to love with a woman
standing under a stop sign
in the worst kind of weather,

falls close to love with the outline
of ordinary thighs under a rain soaked
skirt, his eye sidling up
towards her ample waist,
plain face and her hat, worn

at an awkward angle. And I would like
the hero to come toward her,
step in a puddle as he crosses the road,
and I would like the whole
of the blemished world to cease

existing between them: the pocked
concrete sidewalk, the whorled
knots of the trees, the nail holes
in the telephone poles, the crevices
and cuts - smoothed over.

Then I would like storybooks rewritten
to reflect the fact that no one is whole,
the endings left wide open, the possibility
of loss always there, hanging
like a street light.

We think we know the world and imagine
there is order in it, but this turning
the corner into love is as much a myth
as anything - the man with the lazy eye
and the women who walk by him.

Still, what astounds me most in this
isn't our tireless wanting, the old
college try. It isn't the half-life
we try not to fall into. It's
how we find each other

remarkable, despite the absence 
of wisdom or humour or pity, despite
the absence of attributes we cannot name.
All of us wanting just enough and searching
the pockets of the world to find it.

Aislinn Hunter

Ahhhhhh..............

Inevitable

Silence descends
like black lace
over a face in mourning.

We cheat and scramble
to avoid mortality
throw dice against prevailing winds
defy all storm warnings
stand out in the gale
stubborn as a shore to sea
that digs and bitches
with the salt of demand -

all that has been cast up
must be returned.

Moi

My New Mantra

Conversion Figure

I spent a long time falling
toward your slender, tremulous face—
a long time slipping through stars
as they shattered, through sticky clouds
with no confetti in them.
I fell toward earth's stony colors
until they brightened, until I could see
the green and white stripes of party umbrellas
propped on your daisied lawn.
From above, you looked small
as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in.
Beside you, blush-pink plates
served up their pillowy cupcakes, and your rosy hems
swirled round your dark head—
I fell and fell.
I fell toward the pulse in your thighs,
toward the cool flamingo of your slip
fluttering past your knees—
Out of God's mouth I fell
like a piece of ripe fruit
toward your deepening shadow.
Girl on the lawn without sleeves, knees bare even of lotion,
time now to strip away everything
you try to think about yourself.
Put down your little dog.
Stop licking the cake from your fingers.
Before today, what darkness
did you let into your flesh? What stillness
did you cast into the soil?
Lift up your head.
Time to enter yourself.
Time to make your own sorrow.
Time to unbrighten and discard
even your slenderness.

MARY SZYBIST

Happy Valentine's Day