Well, poets, there’s some new stuff to do this so-called summer. On Tuesday nights at Le Soleil Lune Café, there’s an open mic beginning at 8pm with a featured reader, and in October, the fall issue of a new magazine HART: A Tome For the Arts will appear. Published by the Newburgh Center For the Arts, HART invites artists to submit poetry, short-short stories, art related commentary, drawings, and photos of, or as, art. For more info, send an SASE to: Tusay c/o NCA 19 Carter Street, Newburgh 12550, or call 561-5741.

--Lee Anne and Brian

Poor Man

As I walked frozen

through the aisle,

I saw a migrant worker

pushed into a suit of blue.

He had no cart.

Only a basket.

His blood eyes

jumped from me

to the cremes in my cart

to the frozen cavatelli

only to stop dead on the orange juice.

He lingered there for a moment.

His eyes glossed over then,

and I saw he had five plantains.

Ten for a buck.

He flipped

the foreign dollar

through his hard fingers,

paid the clerk

and left me pushing my cart,

wondering at the cost of orange juice.

mary hart

There’s not a scent that tweaks my nose

Quite like the scent of gin.

It’s a jigger full of heaven

And just a twist of sin.

The olive stuffed, the tinkling glass

Just sends my heart a-flutter

And sets the stage for battered shrimp

And bread with garlic butter!

Grace Albritton

Where the Orchard is Apocalypse & Harvest Ash

in Old Japan my flowers (flown from Holland

slip-covered in green cellophane)

lay weakly scented with Havoline

and Safe & Sane Dragon flash-powder.

A crane at Sanbancho lifts a new bank’s marble face;

crowds of patient smokers wait for fall

then graciously applaud the young mason’s

twenty story rise without slipping.

The sidewalk offers a Kennedy half-dollar, franc

notes, a crumpled Won (monetarily worthless but

as beautifully colored as firecracker wrappers).

These streets Genji rode in flesh conquests—a priest

in a bar broaches this when I needle him a about "national

identity." Is there? He nods certainty. "Japanese

assume the worst is always over. Beautiful objects

& beautiful people are freakish accidents to be collected."

I touch his unopened book, Endo’s Scandal,

sip his wine, B&G cabernet: what does it mean to be

Japanese Catholic? "No. Japanese and Catholic."

We continue with Genji, it is clear he loves (purely)

Shikibu, Old Japan’s passionate " Literate Countess"

of an age when cocks crowed on golden gates (and officer’s

swords more often than not sheathed themselves in white damask):

why would Shikibu immortalize an emperor’s spoiled son?

"Love," the priest smiles. "A blameless brutality."

I’m only seventeen minutes late. The flowers, green

cellophane shed, bend to the lady’s touch. "Flowers

Fingered by a Lady": I imagine the priest inventing

this title for Endo. She blows smoke from a Rothman’s

over them. "There. Now I prefer their odor." I extract

yen from her purse to reward the koto player. So

far from home, this desire to feed musicians—home,

the other Pacific of mostly dormant volcanoes—downtown

Seattle where street-players strum polyurethaned Yahamas,

(strings rust-black) hammer dulcimers (velvet-lined cases rain-dark);

coins and small bills sprinkled, even food stamps sacrificed for bread

for music required to live.

No one else beckons the koto player so I buy him

a vase of sake. Now he’s ours—he’ll ignore other tables,

his fingers pulling songs from air—threaded needles

closing tears. The flowers hum.

Sean Brendan-Brown

food in the belly

poem in the heart

a good shit at mid day

the rest is gravy

normal