Simply eating her salad

photo: morgan harlow

Simply eating her salad

by Michael Estabrook

Sometimes I become completely overwhelmed

by merely being in her presence,

like this afternoon

at McDonald’s with the grandchildren,

suddenly I’m choked with emotion,

barely able to speak,

while simply watching her

sitting there eating her salad, quietly, unassumingly.

I had to work at not crying,

(What a silly spectacle I would have been.)

dabbing at my eyes

with a crumpled McDonald’s napkin.

“Guess my eyes are watering

because it’s so cold outside.”

(Sure, nice try, you silly old man.)

I can understand being so smitten

when you first fall in love – how can you help it!

The beauty, the youth, the vigor and vitality,

the inescapable mystery of it all,

crashing over you like an avalanche in the Alps.

But come on! I’ve been at this now a long time,

with this woman almost half a century!

How could it be possible

that I still get all choked up watching her

sitting there simply eating her salad?

~ first published in Imitation Fruit Literary Journal

Diptera

artwork: ralph murre

Diptera

by Mary Wehner

Black fly in the wedge of bark,

thin wings resting—

body, boneless still.

Difficult life, that of a fly,

picking through shit,

starved for the sweet in the stubble.

Believe you me,

I too see with a bulged eye,

I too want to step firmly

in the warm decay,

suck the heart from whatever I find.

O Speck!

Ready yourself for flight.

Pity me my grounding.

~ previously published in “…or the opposite” (Red Hydra Press)

RICHARD NIXON MUST DIE

artwork: ralph murre

RICHARD NIXON MUST DIE

(for all the victims of the war)

by Dan Wilcox

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because the cure for cancer lies rotting in a rice paddy of Viet Nam--

Because the next, best President of the United States has no legs and is locked in a VA hospital in Buffalo--

Because the new Martin Luther King, the new Malcolm X got his head blown off in Hue--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because the hope for world peace is crawling thru these streets looking for a fix--

Because the answer to the World’s economy is busy selling her ass on the neon highways of L.A.--

Because the way to feed the children of Africa disappeared in a malnourished brain in Ethiopia--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because there is no hope for any of us, because it is all out of control--

Because Wall St. is there, buys our Presidents, our Mayors, our Congressmen--

Because the Declaration of Independence is enemy propaganda--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because campaign workers are paid to steal and rob instead of sticking labels and dialing telephones--

Because our contributions now go for wiretaps and surveillance instead of buttons and salaries--

Because especially the stay-at-home voters are holy, the salt of the Earth, and the politicians are not--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because the FBI is listening right now, the CIA is listening right now, the Tactical Police Force is on your line right now--

Because you really can’t read everything you want and they have already censored this line--

Because Lenny Bruce died for our sins--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because the townhouses of America are exploding around us--

Because of Watts, and Newark, and Miami, and Chicago--

Because every city is Chicago and Chicago is everycity--

Because our best minds are being taught the M-16 when they should be playing guitars--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because America’s best children are dead, or lost underground, or gone to Sweden, to Canada--

Because there are really no sacred places, the Indians’ burial mounds are breweries--

Because the state of poetry is not really a state but an occupied territory--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because Tricia Nixon has the largest collection of stolen panties in the Free World--

Because Pat Nixon is a raging nymphomaniac hiding in the body of an aging Methodist Barbie doll--

Because America is sick of its rulers’ televised weddings and black-tie inaugurations--

Because when we really need him Lee Harvey Oswald is nowhere to be found--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

Because we no longer just know someone who has been raped but have ourselves been raped--

Because even our bodies have been denied to us, to others, to the future, and we are told “No, stop it, it’s wrong”--

Because it is better to get power than to get laid--

Because when I kissed her she cried and cried because she wanted me and she wanted to come and she couldn’t let me--

Because when I wanted to love America I was told to go kill someone I didn’t even know--

Richard Nixon, the 37th President of these Divided States, must Die!

~ first published in The Greenhell Gazette

About Suffering

photo: ralph murre

About Suffering

by Marilyn Annucci

  

Though you sang to me

while I stood at the stove,

and spoke of cures,

even your optimism in those days

made me a little sad.

The only life I’ve ever wholly believed in

has been the body half-broken, 

or leaving. Even when we find the ones

who make us laugh, whispering

silliness into one another’s necks.

Your pile of pills each morning

has grown, the proteins trying

to  transmit signals to the brain’s front doors

with instructions: Lift hand. 

Regulate temperature. Speak.

Speak to me, dear one,

tell me again, though you scramble a word,

lose a thought, need another nap.

It takes more than a leap of neurons 

to love like this.

~ previously published in Waiting Room

COWBOY DREAMS

artwork: ralph murre

COWBOY DREAMS

by A.D. Winans

I wake from a troubled night's sleep

My eyes burning

My ears on fire

My mouth glued to my gums

I look in the mirror

At two tiny dwarfs

Sitting on my head chewing

On bananas spitting out cornflakes

While uttering profanities

In an alien dialect that befuddles

The President and his cabinet

Primping for the election year

Promising to cure the ills of the world

My brain was in turmoil as the rain outside

Beat down insistently on my eyelids which

Cowered down below the equator of my eyebrows

Like two ripe grapes

Posing for a simulated exercise in intercourse.

Outside on the balcony

 F, Scott Fitzgerald rubbed suggestively

Against Zelda

Who was busy having an affair

With a cigar store Indian

Who puffed smoke in the face of Ezra Pound

Who recited poetry to T.S. Eliot

Who stared in amusement

At the blurred image

Of 13 jazz musicians standing stoop-shouldered

Against a cardboard cutout
Of religious zealots masturbating
At the sight of the original Manager

Which shatters with mushroom force

From the barrels of toy guns

Handed out in the streets of Riot Town

 USA.

I take it for as long as my mind allows

Shake it from my head

With an invisible broom

Made from leftover spider webs

Woven out of abandoned dreams

From the smoke filled pipe

Of an opium lover

Who died sprinting across

The lawn of W.C. Fields

Rolled over with laughter

At the sight of Charlie Chaplin

Clutching a burlap sack

Made from lavender underwear

Sold over the counter

By sexless fashion models

Clad in black leather

Boots and matching caps

Stolen from the wardrobe
Of Char and Madonna

Who take pleasure

In the back seat of a sports car

With a revved-up supercharger

Projecting obscene image

Heaven bound where

Societal cowboys ride bareback

On gelded black stallions

Profess their tiredness

Of Bob Dylan dreams

While smothering the futility

Between the crossed legs

Of a smiling Buddha

~ previously published in Carmel Clowns (Atom Mind Press)

Giverny

artwork: katsushika hokusai (the metropolitan museum of art)

Giverny

by Martha Kaplan

The gardens beautiful without a doubt

and so the crowds throng

passing through the not quite Japanese garden

along the path and over the bridge,

pausing there to gaze long at the water lilies,

imagining those icons made famous

by the painter’s hands, they contemplate the color

of sky and clouds shimmering in the pond,

they move then through the shadowed trees,

along the cindered path opening bright and wide

into the cottage gardens, full floral, with

lavender borders, hollyhocks in high

color, roses everywhere on green lattices,

momentarily, they sit, benched, by the borders,

holding guidebooks,

or huddled on the steps, journaling.

Rested, they pass into the pink house framed in green

shutters, ivy and white roses climbing its walls,

they shoulder from room to room

peering closely at imitations

of the great painter’s works:

crowds of French, crowds of Americans,

crowds of Germans, Italians, Greeks, Czechs, and Yugoslavs

British, Spanish, Scots, Belgians, and Dutch,

Latinos and Latinas, even Solomon Islanders, and Japanese

flowers of all sorts pass through the blue

and yellow kitchen, the bedrooms, and windowed study,

they celebrate the house, examining every detail,

and yet they fail to pause for the art that moved the painter’s eye,

an inspiration, the clearest lines and the bluest blues on every wall:

The Wave, A Thousand Views Along the Tokaido Road—

still slightly creased, as if just lifted from the packing boxes

of precious porcelain.

~ first published in Mobius, The Poetry Magazine

THE THREE GRACES

                        THE THREE GRACES

by John Flynn

Tonight the Marx Brothers. They're indignant and rage.

So complacent they go, eyes wide, with angels.      

They engage the declarative sentence like Norwegian          

knights turned home. Wardrobed dell'arte moderne 

they murder the Guelphs and the Ghibellines.

With black bulbed bicycle horns Harpo honks  

like a gaggle of east-bound geese. The brothers    

cover their mayhem with impromptu parades

and props only a royal torturer could love.

(A blow torch suttees cigars and singes

every moustache on the screen save one.) 

Steaming coffee cups appear like magic saucers     

from a mother ship. A menagerie…of which

less said is better. Nothing is left to chance. Yet

chance prevails. What are the chances of that?

~ previously published in Lost Highways and Living Rooms 

On Being Slow

On Being Slow

by Angela Consolo Mankiewicz

I.

It has always taken me so long

to understand, to "see," to say "oh,

that's what that means."

It has also always taken me so long

to get to where ever I may be headed

if not determined by roads, tracks,

ferries, or air routes.

Neither defect was overwhelming

except to a loved one here and there

or an unloved one there and here;

It was also not overwhelming when

there was plenty of time ahead of me

and not so much in back as there is

this year or will be next.

II.

I've always disliked the current generation

badmouthing the one about to overtake it,

especially when I am one of the current

and I am always one of some "current."

Perhaps because I've always been so slow

it takes me so much time to understand

that I'm not needed or not in the same way,

that those who sincerely depend on me

will be as able to transfer their loyalties

like I have, in my own disquieting insistence

on keeping myself whole.

III.

It has also taken some time for me to see

that if found dead, my body would no longer

be reported as that of a young woman

and that if I’m lucky “mature sexuality” will last

until old age creeps in, so slowly - or suddenly -

I won’t notice until it’s long gone

~ previously published in DUFUS (Lummox Press)

Upon Reading Thoreau . . .

artwork: ralph murre

Upon Reading Thoreau’s Description of a Pickerel as “Animalized Water”

by Steve Tomasko

I remember the dock warped, weathered, worn

smooth from years of sun and water. Plunked

face down I peer between the gray slats

watch the perch slide by ignoring

my baited hook. My young eyes fix

on a shard of sunlight and color

that gradually resolves into a 2-foot pike.

Floating in place, its body ripples front

to back, front to back looking ready to lunge

for the perch. But with a quick muscular

flick it disappears, leaving eddies

of whirling sand. I shiver.      I was struck

when I read of a father who recently found his son

in their cabin boathouse surrounded by rods, reels,

fishing tackle—playing an electronic fishing game.

~ first published in Verse Wisconsin (online edition)

Seascape

artwork: ralph murre

Seascape

by Sharmagne Leland-St.John

Sea I love the way you tremble

Like my lady lost inside my arms

Lying spent and sighing

Sometimes she thinks

She might be dying

Like a moth who's caught

Between the lampshade and the flame

"Hold me tight", she whispers

Like the wind that wraps itself around

The tall pine tree

I cling I cannot let her slip away

She is my love

She is who tells me what I am

I am the waiting shining sun

I am the moon whose light

Will help to fill the weary night

With rays of yellow gold

Just like the dawn of yesterday

Sea I love the way you tremble

Your waves will pound and crash upon the sand

Her tangled auburn hair strand for strand

Will mingle with the crystal tears

Your emerald ocean sheds

My lady's laughing sighing

Like a seagull flying

High above your breakers

Tumbling towards the land

She takes my hand and whispers

"Don't let go. I love you so"

Sea I love the way you tremble

Like my lady lost inside my arms

Lying spent and sighing

So like a dying Queen

Between

The crumpled sheets

~ first published in Unsung Songs

Shifty Meininger

Shifty Meininger

by Robert Nordstrom

It all starts with a doodle,

always a doodle,

triangles with convex

or concave supports

burdened beneath the weight of

blackened-in circles

whose imperfect circumferences

grow larger and larger

as the hand tries to

steady the mind until

—voila—there’s an eye, a nose, or

even, just now, a marble and

—voila again—Shifty Meininger,

the best shot on the playground,

his skinny as a doodle ten-year-old self

leaning back, right foot cut

inward and inching up

to the scratch I scratched

with a stick in the dirt,

left eye shut,

right one squinting

on my prize cat’s eye boulder,

holding that shiny silver steely

I’ve coveted since it spilled out

of his bag delicately between

thumb and finger finger,

and I’m thinking

what kind of fool puts up

his prize cat’s eye boulder against

a guy named Shifty

as he slides his hand

forward and back

forward and back and

—voila—lets it fly

true, too true, splitting

my cat’s eye right in half

in an odd kind of Sunday School justice

that makes me think of

wise old King Solomon

and how I should have told Shifty

as he was eying up my cat’s eye:

Stop, just take it, go on take it,

it’s yours.

~ Originally published in Peninsula Pulse

WHISTLING MOTHER

WHISTLING MOTHER

by Karla Huston          

My mother whistles under her breath,

all day, all the time.  Not the sweet

song birds make but a toothy melody,

a skipped record, her lips pursed to a point.

She does this leaning over the sink

to peel potatoes, spooning coffee

into the basket, clearing the table.

She whistles in the car when she’s not

sighing or sorting through tissues and bottles

full of pills.  She does it while watching TV,

paging through magazines,

maybe even while she sleeps.

The tune is always the same, al dente

half song, a few notes rising and falling.

I wonder how my father can stand it.

Maybe he’s just tuned her out,

after all those years of chucking nickels

into the jukebox of her mouth.

My own daughter tells me I do

the same thing, and I admit it, catch

myself sometimes--lips puckered, teeth

set, the air adjusting its wings, hoping the birds

are waiting, their ears cocked just so.

~ first published in North Coast Review

An Angler Silently Waits

digital art: ralph murre

An Angler Silently Waits

by Gary C. Busha

I

Rain falls

and glass allows sunlight

first freely through then

later in yellow tinges

somewhat distorted in forms

though no great matter to me

since silence brings the same

lack of breath

in a kind of suffocation

as impatient drivers rev

their engines at intersections

engines similar to nightmares

when in the early morning I try

to recall a dream so vivid but

lost at the instant of awakening.

II

Nor would the forgetting disturb me

if the failure were not a reminder

of dogma cited in textbooks

by professors intent in their learning

but unaware of deception’s slippery eel

as is the rockbass hugging a weedy shore

or the minstrel singing for free

to the young whose wisdom is a tune I too

would sing if the song were poetry and

free from past moment’s regrets

caught in night’s flashy broil and pressed

against damp window panes.

III

But yet nothing is worse when light fails

not in meaning perhaps or inspiration

or the hollow knowledge the light

was never meant this gilded affectation

or to a lesser extent this phony

entertainment performed for laughs

by jesters nor should the touch

of cold rain upon naked shoulders

cause alarm if the word has no primal source

has not sprung from heaven or hell or

from the still point of nothing.

IV

But since light grows larger in circles

despite the chew of time

each word falls from its portrait like flakes

of paint and peels in thin serpentine lines

repeated even upon blackened cave walls

lit by torches until the flickered

rhythm matches the ripped heart whose ruin

is no less ignored than before this moment’s

spin on the ferris-wheel for failure is subordinate

to water’s steady fall upon crystal window panes

in rivulets while I lament the rain's patient silence

as wet line builds on a spool.

~ first published in The Third Eye, No.8