Paris

Days in gray Marais
with terror between the gorges
we parted ways wordlessly in the evening
a good poet helped me
until we found each other and drank
something at tables of weathered beauty
to forget the cold of the
path back through the air

JÜRGEN BECKER
translated from the German by Okla Elliott

Joyelle McSweeney

Sestina Ayotzinapa

Never a grave large enough, never a grave large enough
Never enough powder to ladle over the face of the grave
Never enough pine boughs to go sweeping and 'soughing'
Never enough time to make a throat for all the vowels
Never a wide enough mouth to crunch around the bones of the bird
Never enough digestive juices to leach the crime from the bones of the earth

For I am not the earth.
Never a laugh shallow enough
Never a crater on the moon blank enough for the bird
of guilt to settle. Never enough grave
maidens to prop up their chins on the Bridge of Sighs
Which is a euphemism for their exposed collar bones, release the vowels

Of the grave, the long vowels
Of flora stinking in their cells and rising up as garlands from the earth.
Never a lie like a truncheon or a sigh
nightblack or diaphanous enough
it cannot find its ear to crunch. Never a birdy
hunch that cannot find a kernel of the brain

In which to lie-or hide. Never a drain
Punched in the bowels,
Never a drug patch, never a morphine feed its unstuck button a spirit level a bird
Called 'hop-o-my-thumb' to gerry-rig up an earthy
jig as it tips its board bound body into the brine. Never enough
waves to disperse the ashes. Never enough sighs.

The crime happened but it wasn't genocide
The bodies were heaped in the grave,
but it forgot to inflorate with stains, with student i-d cards, dental records, enough
DNA to light up Googlemaps with a green pharmaceutical smile
across the face of the earth
a grin for the school photo. The Junior Varsity Ayotzinapa Birds

Rise in flock
From the earth ... Which is a lie. But something sighs
From their rotting absence which stains the face of earth
Like a pale palm raised at the wrong moment when light engraves
The film with light and as white light blinds the eye of the owl
which is Wisdom, the Huntress moon. Also white. Enough

Wisdom for tonight. Enough sighing, vows, birds, earth.
If the birds have mercy, they'll close their wings around the moon
and allow us to sleep together in our common grave.

Joyelle McSweeney

Violet

I sit down to write and end up

reading everyone else’s poems

about death, flowers and airborne dogs.

The wreath of birdseed I hung on the spruce

is gone, even the string that held it

although a circle of seed lies on the snow

in a pattern of bird and squirrel tracks.

Six blocks away a woman I know lies dying;

a violet in the snow.   Last night she did not

eat her ice cream.  Outside her window

a bird-feeder full, sits untouched.

I wonder if the birds who claimed

my wreath will migrate to where she lies
if their feathers like petals will moult into spring.

-Debbie Calverley

Blind Willie

You know after death, you have to go by yourself.
                                        —Blind Willie Johnson

Left to Itself the Heart Continues to Pound at Its Chest - Jill Osier

Waking I still see you
working the thing of us
like a difficult thermos.
You turn it like even the idea
of hands is new. Strange.
Beautiful. Wondrous ape. 

JILL OSIER

Happy 2016

Unreachable

Cry into the sea

Breathe out sky

Take stock of time

de-canting through

a liquid hourglass.

Remember the sound

of sea as it rushes

the feel of skin

as it prickles to wind

or the way turquoise water

turns clear in the cup

of your hands as you stand

alone and unreachable -

horizon paper thin.

-Debbie Calverley

Untitled (for now)

Cry into the sea
Breathe out sky
Take stock of time
de-canting through

Remember the sound
of a sea as it rushes
the feel of skin
as it prickles to wind

or the way turquoise water
turns clear in the cup
of your hands as you stand
alone and unreachable -
horizon paper thin.
Debbie Calverley

Airports

In the silence of my hotel room
sudden noise of building fans
planes take off and land
on the highway all the traffic
hurries somewhere.

I'm tired with nowhere to go
Tomorrow is another day.

Debbie Calverley

A great link to show solidarity

You can watch this update live from around the world, it is a great thing to do!
btw this was not an attack on music it is not that specific it's an attack on all of us and everything we stand for, it is not limited to something singular.  Everything is about people.

https://secure.avaaz.org/en/paris_solidarity/?bGhzOjb&v=68045

Prayer - Lia Purpura

Prayer

Its occasion
could be
a spot of sun,
bar sign, label
on jeans,
carnation, red
light where you
wait and
gratitude hits.
Or a name
the length
of a subway car
that only makes sense
when you say it aloud
in your head
as it passes. 

LIA PURPURA

It Shouldn't Have Been Beautiful 

Dig - for November 1st, 2015

As storm skies blow in

calmer seas begin to churn

to toss and turn, whirl

in spiral pools, drill

to excavate some ancient site

buried in its sandy bed.

And so we search

to find mystery lost

only revealed when wild skies

flash strobes of lightning

clap out thunder at midnight

wake us from our small lives.

Set the every day on fire!

Quiet endless tick of wall clocks.
Dig - blow the ghosts away.

- Debbie Calverley

Fall

Poplar leaves shiver
Silver dollars in sunlight
Spruce stands ever green

- Debbie Calverley

As Evening Comes

His scribbled thoughts

dissolve into clouds

pink with evening sun-fire.

Until day descends

into dusk his eyes reflect

that unsinkable blue –

A ship on the horizon

sails ghost white.

Somewhere in a grotto

of yellow rock and olive trees

her shape in shadows.

As day heat generates

into the small of her back

she instinctively reaches –

A small star begins to gleam
A full moon expands

- Debbie Calverley

CK Williams

Writers Writing Dying
CK Williams

Many I could name but won’t who’d have been furious to die while they were sleeping but did—
outrageous, they’d have lamented, and never forgiven the death they’d construed for themselves 
being stolen from them so rudely, so crudely, without feeling themselves like rubber gloves 
stickily stripped from the innermostness they’d contrived to hoard for themselves—all of it gone, 
squandered, wasted, on what? Death, crashingly boring as long as you’re able to think and to write it.

Think, write, write, think: just keep galloping over the hurdles and you won’t notice you’re dead.
The hard thing’s when you’re not thinking or writing and as far as you know you are dead 
or might as well be, with no word for yourself, just that suction-shush like a heart pump or straw 
in a milkshake and death which once wanted only to be sung back to sleep with its tired old fangs
has me in its mouth!— and where the hell are you that chunk of dying we used to call Muse?

Well, dead or not, at least there was that dream, of some scribbler, some think- and write- person, 
maybe it was even yourself, soaring in the sidereal void, and not only that, you were holding a banjo 
and gleefully strumming, and singing, jaw swung a bit under and off to the side the way crazily 
happily people will do it—singing songs or not even songs, just lolly-molly syllable sounds, 
and you’d escaped even from language, from having to gab, from having to write down the idiot gab.

But in the meantime isn’t this what it is being dead, with that Emily-fly buzzing on your snout 
that you’re singing as she did, so what matter if you died in your sleep, or rushed toward dying 
like the Sylvia-Hart part of the tribe who ceased too quickly to be and left out some stanzas?
So what? You’re still aloft with your banjoless banjo, and if you’re dead or asleep who really cares?
Such fun to wake up though! Such fun too if you don’t! Keep dying! Keep writing it down!

Last Lovely October Day!

Oh dear I resemble the Ortega painting!

Ortega '64 - Love this!!

Happy Thanksgiving - a gorgeous autumn!

Blue

And the sky is so blue
And the leaves so yellow
And she thinks of his eyes

Somewhere a sea recedes
Too soon taken

- Debbie Calverley