At 68
My outside
maintains a certain Boho roughness, frayed lace,
dinged beads, mismatched features drifting.
Beneath—birds of paradise, open-mouthed, greedy.
Orchids trembling, insects winged and bumping.
I try to keep all that’s inside, inside.
Let what’s still pulsing, pulse. What’s scrawling, scrawl.
I don’t wish to be young again; all that cheap ramen.
But voila, if I was twenty, I’d tell myself
to get off the sticky toilet, in the bathroom stall
of that bar, where I sobbed into brittle toilet paper.
Why? Who even remembers?
I’d tell me, life is like a moth. It’s not all sniffing
camphor and gnawing wool sweaters.
Sometimes you’re neon
Sometimes you flutter
—Tina Barry
Grandparents’ House 1967
Sisters, in their nightclothes, tear at wrapped boxes.
A plug-in piano’s array of keys, far confined, far sufficient.
Antebellum-style dollhouse.
Painter’s palette with twelve colour cakes.
Red spinning wheel, resolute, without yarn.
Ballerina in a case, pointed shoe inscribing circles.
Ice skates, turned out at the ankle.
Battery-powered dog ruddering neck and foot, belly up.
For bullet-tight curls, snood and rollers.
Emptied, a blue pram.
An infant uncle’s dimpled discontent the sisters prod.
From one Christmas to the next the years, disguised, expand.
No anticipating how it is one choice
will splinter, tumour-like,
become a distant escalation or affliction,
like the blue eyes passed to one child, the hazel to another.
—Garth Martens
Haiku
frost limns fallen leaves
each a crystalline wonder
trees silently awed
—Marisa Campbell
Thanksgiving, Woodstock, New York, 2009
The pianist was a high school bandleader.
His wife the singer did community theater.
The bassist was a serious playah from the Village scene,
The drummer taught math at Rutgers.
Over it all hung “Strange Fruit,”
Foreboding, iconic, lush,
Immune to the occasional sour note,
The background murmur, the post-prandial torpor.
Down the road John Daido Loori had just passed away,
Surrounded by his Zen Mountain disciples.
His picture was stuck on the ornate gold cash register
In the bar at La Duchesse Anne’s.
I climbed up Mount Tremper,
Met a man in full camouflage hunting bear.
How far to the fire tower? I asked.
You ain’t going to get there today, he said.
The neighbors talked about their couples’ therapy
And suddenly everything seemed far away,
The moon above the mountain
Running in place behind scudding clouds.
The band played on, but no one was listening.
Incidentals (flute, clarinet)
Were handled by an old hippie (me) who couldn’t keep time.
—Stephen Billias
Tut
What if I leave you with
an empty honey jar with traces of sand
a handful of red seeds for your mother
a painting of home on your thumbnail
a pulse of hope whenever a magpie cries
a wind that shakes a desert shrub
and a hole in the boots you wore
while looking for me
what if I leave
searing gratitude
and a grief as dark as my fur
that what we love won’t always
be visible to our eyes
—Sarah LaMoy
Warehouses
Encroaching the horizon
Solid blocks of concrete
Gaping black holes
Devoid of life
Waiting on
Stuff
And more stuff
Filling storage sheds
Devoid of life
Waiting on
Stuff
And more stuff
No end to stuff
—Nancy Layne
Advice to a Young Poet
Do not write about the sky,
or what the clouds look like.
Instead, write about the ceiling.
The crack in the plaster. That
is the real sky. For God’s sake,
do not write about love. Write
about the way she puts her car
in reverse, the way she turns
her head, the way her hair (O,
her long hair!) sways, the way
the brake lights leave a wake
of blood. That is the real love.
Do not write about a mountain.
Write about the pebble in your
shoe that makes you want to
stop walking. That is the real
mountain. So, go ahead an
write but not about big things.
Write about small things, how
the refrigerator hums a ballad
sadder than the one on the radio,
the way the milk carton sweats
on the table, the way the spoon
see-saws in your hand. Write
about all the things that are in
your way. And above all, always
use ambiguity, but in moderation,
please, for too much is bad for
the heart, too little bad for the brain.
—J. R. Solonche
Thirty Thousand Pounds
Thirty thousand pounds of a bomb
Falling down on a window sill
With a small pot sitting on it
And a pink flower in it
Here comes another thirty thousand
Pounds of TNT hitting a man on a bicycle
Rushing to get the last loaf of bread
Left on the shelves
Another thirty thousand pounder will hit
The crowded town circle
Creating an enormous crater
For the kids to play
Sliding on chipped boards
A long way down
For a sniff
Of the pungent
Smell of death
—Ze’ev Willy Neumann
In Memory
Three
Hundred
Sixty
Five
Days
Have
Passed
Since
You
Did
—Penny Scofield
Sand Castles
Hard work, wet hands
Building castles in the sand
Back and forth carrying loads
Smiling faces designing roads
Little voices softly sighed
All days work gone with the tide.
—Maria A. Miller DeGroff
Drudging Thick
Bee bellies drudging thick
herbal pollen
provincial polenta on
daisy-white fine china
spring is always friend-far
and home-old
yesterday he kept pouring
wine from frog-croaked barrels
bare boned on a balmy 49
low 17, but who’s counting?
because yesterday
the crocus cropped
because yesterday
roast rare red roses
twirled in well done fingers
boar bristled grass
all gussied up in gossamer
frayed plaid edge of a torn south-east wind.
those wet strewn scraps
of last year’s photosynthesis
envelopes full of bugs
sealed with sloppy winter’s kiss.Demeter has laid in my wheelbarrow
sack of potatoes
barrel of monkeys
barrel of laughs when the dress flares up.
—Alyssa Almanza
Euphemisms
I didn’t lose my mother,
I knew right where she was
When she passed
Passed away—
To where?
Your pet goes over the rainbow bridge
No one ever says that about people
She would say she was in a
Better place
She would mean heaven
Which is what I told the young ones
But what evidence is there for such a place?
I will say almost anything to avoid
The final word—died
She died.
It is a new grief every time.
—Amy Caponetto Galloway
Off the Hill
The deer come down early
to kick snow off the pile
of honey locust seed pods
I had raked in early November—
wheelbarrows in a banner season.
They range over the hill and down.
Meek and wild, they browse.
They are ungulates.
They show the behavior,
the alert calm, of ungulates.
They are alert to passing cars.
They scuff a hoof off others
as though the pile is their own.
They chomp on honey locust pods
I had raked in early November.
—Steve Clark
Sijo at the Museum
I sometimes spoil my day
thinking of artworks in storage:
The swell of blue hills or chattering rocks,
solemn portrait sitters—
Colors and shapes of a great lost world
slumbering in the dark.
—Lachlan Brooks
