Blue Jays and Adder's-tongue

Let me try again.
No matter how much self-regard I have,
it has not been easy, this strut,  
this combative whining, this living with myself.
Nonplussed by what I've done, by what I haven't done.
Frenzied, tranquil,
a variable demeanor.  
I am less then I am more.  I am two blue jays  
nesting in a chokecherry tree,  
an overripe smell from the garbage  
and I am not these,
nor the concern for pain in my upper torso.
I am as singular as each event.
I am my own dodo, extinguishing myself.
 
Splashes of sunlight turn me to something else
reckless as any other early green thing.
Crocus, adder's-tongue, dandelion,
I am all of these,
also,  
an old tree,  
a pitted, dead, branchless trunk.

-- Frank C. Praeger

It Had Not Been Planned

Fixed,
fathomed,
fathered -
to have been so embraced.
Surrogates self-delegated
released
and moments encountered reprieved.
A mother's cadenced staccato appeal.
A baby turns away.
The rest is shadows, twitches,
no neonatal  remains  
or tittle tattle refuge
deferential  to self;
a refusal of heaps,
ditto the tremulous mud-clogged soles  
soft-shuffling towards nowhere.

-- Frank C. Praeger

Electraglide and Cookies

She looked at me imperiously over
Her handlebars, powder blue-and-white
Streamers cascading in the breeze of her
Passage, rumbling like an Electraglide
With the Queen of Spades held captive
By a wooden clothespin on her fork,
Strumming her spokes to the variable
Melody of her speeding, slowing, stop.  

“Come over for a snack,”  

She said, or was it

“License and registration.”  

How could I not agree as she
Led me to her house and kitchen table, her
Mom dispensing cookies and milk
To her and me, her latest
Collar. 

-- Tom Rubenoff

Monks in the Orchard Picking Peaches

Young monk
and old monk
in the orchard
picking peaches,
sunny and plump,
ready for canning.

Carrying bushels
to the wagon cart,
the young monk
asks the old monk
what to look out for
when growing old.

The old monk
pauses and says
not much.
Life stays the same
for the most part.
Monks work and pray
but an old monk
works slower and
prays faster.

But not to worry,
the old monk advises.
He admits he's
going deaf
but that's just
an inconvenience
since God uses
sign language.
Peaches like these
have no need to talk.

-- Donal Mahoney

Hope and Mr. Neery

I saw Mr. Neery,
ninety if a day,
wobbly on his walker

on his way to Sunday Mass.
He won't accept a ride,
insists on walking.

He's easy to spot,
a St. Louis Cardinals fan
in a bright red jacket

and a Cardinals cap
that halts a hurricane
of snowy hair.

It's his first Mass  
since burying his wife
a month ago when

someone lent him
a black suit to wear.
Now he's in red again,

a sign of hope,
even if he's bent over,
his humped back a

question mark growing.
But he's no different now
than he was before.

He still comes to Mass
like everyone else
looking for the answer

and to pray for the Cardinals
who play the Mets
at 1 o'clock this afternoon.

-- Donal Mahoney

Madman in Remission

Does he remember?
Jenny, how could he forget?
Thirty years ago you roared
into his office and raged
about your cousin's
decision to marry him.
He had never met you.
Your cousin had told him
you were in town
and suggested he
take you to lunch,
show you Chicago.
She didn't know
you were angry.
You were just Jenny,
her cousin, her playmate
from childhood
down on the farm.
You didn't want her
to marry anyone
and leave you the last
cousin still single,
something odd
in those days
when nobody knew.
You mocked him
and he couldn't respond
with people around.
But, Jenny,
you could have died
that day in his office.
Thirty years later,
he's still a madman
in remission.
No apology will do.

-- Donal Mahoney

Winter Flower

Don’t worry

about September
turning
its cold shoulder
on you

the future
always running
too damned early

don’t be afraid

of losing
your color

being
covered
in black sunshine
buried

by the moon

to grow
where all things
go
 

-- Scott Blackwell

Footnote

I run into this small grocery for a few odds and ends
to make an excellent soul food feast tonight
(red beans and rice, greens, yeah)—

middle of the week, about 5:30 in the afternoon,
the place actually crowded now
with people mostly just off work,
buying food for their poor meager dinners,
and everyone so glum, beaten down, surly, bored
or just boring—or is it only
my own surly glum and boredom?

Thinking this, I walk past the large blow-up
of an old black-and-white photograph, circa 1930,  
hung high on the wall, of a group posed
in typical 3-layered tier in front of a train car,
presumably the long-forgotten, seminal employees
of this currently large chain

—or whoever—
call them former victims of a former age,
all long dead and buried
and hardly mattering a jot,
the same as the rest of us here—

and I suddenly feel somehow
that we are already up there on that wall,
while I also wonder if anyone else around me
is having these thoughts
as they make their way home,
probably for nothing more than to belch and fart
in front of the mind-numbing glow of the television,
until they pass out before getting up tomorrow
to do the whole thing  
over again,
never knowing why
as I never know why,
also trying to find the way back home.

And I’m still considering those poor bastards
in that picture, long gone,
now as free  
as any American can get,
as I stand waiting in the check-out line,
hoping like hell
that at least some of them
were able to find a little life beyond the servitude
they were born into,

but also knowing that, at this point, I should really be thinking
mostly about myself,  
as the cashier hands me my receipt,

that I should be fighting much harder to win something more
than some thin document
that barely proved I was here at all.

-- Scott Blackwell

Paper Ship Builders

Journeys are conceived
Plans made
Maps drawn
Provender procured
Crews pressed

Combinations of sound
Hastily hammered together in urgent necessity
Amid the cacophony, or
Constructed rib by rib
With circumspect, deliberate
Painstaking self-remonstrance
Taken to micro-fractals
Of choices
Designed all
To accomplish one task
To carry one burden
To deliver whole and intact

So we set our paper ships to sail
On stormy seas and we are
Surprised when they do not arrive,
Make it only part way
Or deliver the unintended

We can blame ourselves
We can blame others, or
The sea, or  
Wallow in the wreck
Of sunken expectation

Or we can take new paper and pen
And begin again

-- Tom Rubenoff 

Concubine

Letters, lines, sentences --
my cheating, lying lover;
you climb in bed with
me aroused, while
screwing someone other.

Ecstatic I glimpse your
glorious stripped down
form; breathe your warm
verbs, feel fluidity as you
stretch before me.  
Your adjectives pulse with
rhythm; obscene lullaby
of magnificent dissonance.
I roll your nouns around
my tongue and taste blood:
salty fruit fat with promise.
Sun hot exclamations
probe with fevered fingers –
I beg for commas,
you pause deliciously.

You bastard how dare you
follow and stab at me like Poe?
Slice me into ribbons;
I’m a tired, wordy ho.
You sing to Cin like Sappho
in ancient Greece B.C.,
but use your rhyme-wrought
expletives as you spit at me.
You accuse with alliteration,
a tort et a travers!
Dashes lash me to a pulp,
colons chew me bare.

Sultry metaphors of
pleasure vibrate in
your verse; I shiver then
climax with your turn –
quotations hold me close.  
In simile I will marry you
time and over again;
I am your concubine --
brutal slave of stanza,
period.

-- Cynthia A. Ventresca 

Twenty Five Years to Life

The morning after you told me –
your desperation weaving in
and out of a bad connection, that
you were up for twenty five years to life
for pissing in a 7-11 parking lot,
after a dinner of vodka,
the kind you could buy with the last
of yesterday’s panhandling;
arrested for stabbing yourself.
A repeat offender.  

The morning after you told me –
the newspaper read:
Toughness on Crime Gives Way
To Fairness, and I remembered you,
in the car, singing Sympathy for
the Devil like when we were kids,
arm hanging out of the window,
hand-rolled cigarette in your lips,
bottle in your pocket;
your red eyes drowning in tears
born for Mary in her too-young grave.

As we inch closer to our
untapped truth, we repel –  
we all start with a fear
of the darkness.

And you, with the strength of
a thousand torn men, wrestle in
endless circles of answers for
which there are no questions –
in trial after punishing trial;
and in it’s perfect sorrow
your stillness waits ... and weeps.

-- Cynthia A. Ventresca 

A Running Path

I snatch up momentum from the streetlights.
You need my assurance. I can't give it.
Your friendship vexes me. On the horizon,
Orion lies on its side, an envelope
unopened. I must rework my words;
after my run we have to 'talk.' Turning
away from truth. I've tried—you don't want that.

I want to sweat out emotion. Airplanes
blink above me, as high and expensive
as reason. I’m running, but not away—
or back—my mind’s running around our loop—
identical condos, regulated
footsteps, vibrations undoing my laces;
I can’t get anywhere.

-- Maria S. Picone

Futuristic is Now Retro

dreams of spaceflight are as antiquated
as JFK’s Brahmin accent.
blasting out to the stars is a ‘60s hobby
with period costumes.
when they remake Star Trek performing
conscious mimesis
blending the slim efficiency of our era
with polyester throwbacks
to another heyday they’re not mocking
but assuming a uniform;
like tablets, they are predestined redesigns
of imagination's technology.

patents, recursive to technical advances,
congregate in magazine ads,
until the millennia resurrect wistful
predictions, converting
medieval sketches to modern days.

-- Maria S. Picone

Chapbook

My friend and I passed our
notebook between each
other, the cover creased
with our longing.  Its image,
stars in their eyes, pink-purple
cats.  Our subject, nature
dancing with narration’s
promise: transcendental.
“Dawn is when light/rises
up into the sky,” I said,
defining the ninth-year limits
of my language.  (Sky: half
an easy rhyme.) This poetry
delivered us, potential armed
with fuchsia pens, to a writer’s
conference for elementary
poets. Opening the chapbooks
of other words, we leaned in,
and tendrils caressed us. 

-- Maria S. Picone

Dust

I
This crushed earth, nomadic particles, used to be something.
A reconstructed array of jars, puzzles made whole. They are
spirits from an afterlife, an afterimage of humankind: graves
dug up and reassembled. But now they only hold the past.
Like the ground, they break in the places where it is most
logical: fault, lines.

II
Telescopes align in concentric circles. Electrical wires crackle,
inverted trees with black, hanging roots. Territorial weeds
spread out across the landscape, hoarding their own networks
of water. Children build technology from toothpicks, making science
a playground game for connections, iterations. White spaces
succumb to warm orange spaces. Nature has its own installation
art. Advancement steals through land like this, leaving broken
shards of plasticity. Leaving misshapen metal frameworks.
Dust marks the void for progress.

III
Layers of time
    march on
and leave fragments    
    behind
for others to put    
    together.

Each layer assumes a name
    going forward,
technology sprung up from
    man’s ribs
and got a master’s degree
    to advance
its career. Civilization
    carries out
Millions of deaths, flung
    at the land
The organic matter decays
    and the artificial
Decays too. Progress leaves
    souvenirs.

IV
They whisper, “Come back to me,” as though the entirety of human civilization can stop and turn back the unidirectional arrow of time. Some do come back. They put together jars from the crumbling bits of jars; they paint them lovingly and make them lustrous. But they don’t have the originals anymore. They are working from the Form of Jar, and from there they advance into having an instantiation of a jar that, in their imagination, matches the jars they have studied from writings and seen on other jars or seen intact, and then it’s done. It will remain in this form for years, tended carefully in a garden of other re-unbroken jars, behind a wall of glass in a museum. In an art book. On jstor.

By unbreaking them, do they bind their spirits to the earth? Can their souls—yes, even the souls of jars—not march on, joining their fellows and their users? Instead, do they remain, captive organisms that never die?

-- Maria S. Picone

Old Stag Giddy

Elmer's an old stag now
shedding antlers
snorting among the trees

but sometimes Martha
after her shower
is a doe beckoning  

and he becomes giddy
and heads for the salt lick
happy in the breeze

-- Donal Mahoney

Hiding Places

These days, I remember so many hiding places
My childhood was pretty much filled with them

Warm quiet places, away, alone; so alone
I could hear my own breathing, the wheeze,

And the whisper of the stories I told myself,
Played all the parts, did the voices, the scenery.

There was the attic and, of course, the coal cellar,
Abandoned places, full of abandoned things,

 Haunted places, even alone they seemed crowded
As if others were there breathing and speaking.

There was the far back end of the front hall closet
Where it tapered down to a space just big enough

To fit, to sit in the silence of coats, large empty things,
Generations’ worth of outer appearance, hiding,

And, the dark of the back stairs where they turned;
A wider, green carpeted step I could almost curl onto.

There were beds to crawl under, a loft in the garage
That held so little weight I always knew I was alone.

Even the almost completely dark of these places was
Calming, opening or closing my eyes to the same

To the same limitless nature of these small places,
Small places opening and closing, welcoming me in

Growing just large enough to accommodate me and
My stories, the escape and hiding places they were.

-- J. K. Durick

Small Packages

I’d like to drink
up the Universe
from a can
of Diet Coke,

bought from
my ancestors’
most virtuous
moments.

With no deposit
required--can’t be
returned without
your consent,

a secret label on
the side that reads:
“only the purest,
natural ingredients.”

Has a pull tab that
opens like a forever
Christmas morning

or your lover’s
warm embrace,

with overflowing
rivers of wine that

never run dry or
leave you wanting.

The aluminum reflects
images of man’s
greatest achievements         
for study,

that hold you spellbound  
suchlike an enchanted storyteller.

Just a man and his can:

with whole chunks
of Emily Dickinson

on the bottom and

bubbles of beauty,
truth and time that
won’t dissolve---

like a Keatsean urn.

-- Gil Hoy

A Sense of Self

The sky was                                                                                                                                                                                                        swallowed up by                                                    
the mouth of                                                                                                   
the seas and             
                                                   submerged then,          

mother earth buried                                                                                        
the sun and the                                                                                                    
man in the moon,
   
dirt-soiled raindrops,
boulder clouds,
jagged-leafed flower
lightening,                                                                                            
fish stars,  
                                                                                                
while I light-yeared                                                                                                    
                                                        along in all of this                          
strapped to my                                                                                                 
time roller-coaster                                                                                                                     
                                                    rocket car seat,

travelling on a tornado                                                                                                              
                                                     circles’ road of        
constellations and planets 
bound together by
God's Divine  Simplicity.

But now Big Ben chimes,
the shrill tea kettle boils,
barking dogs to feed,                                                                                 
and my rattling car's      
                                                  around the shop for repairs.

And now                                       
                                                                 Oneness
so hard                                                                              
to find.   

-- Gil Hoy

Home Invasion Encore

This time Wilma
is ready for the bastards
jimmying her front door,
coming back for more.
The first time she was asleep,
the bedroom light on,
the Bible open at her side
to John, Chapter 6,
"Do this in remembrance of me."
Tonight, however,
Wilma's lying on the couch
with the lights out,
the rosary in one hand,
her late husband's pistol
cocked in the other.
Jack taught her how to use it
when she was a bride
and tonight she will pray
for the men now
coming through the door
and then she will use it
in remembrance of Jack
and call the police.
With all the commotion,
she'll probably miss Mass
but it's a weekday,
no sin involved.

-- Donal Mahoney