In his back yard, near the budding crab apple tree, a little boy holds a Mason jar of fireflies up to the sickle moon to watch them disappear as they flash.
On a bed far into the night, a dog flinches in its sleep. Lying on his side, chest rising and falling quickly, pawing the air. A hand reaches out from under the quilt. The woman touches her dog’s shoulder. Runs her fingers down his flanks until he breaths easer. She closes her eyes believing that dogs dream only of running in spring fields.
After an hour, the lights were switched on. He looked up from where he had parked to the shaded window of the apartment. Tire treads clapped across the brick lines of the cobbled street. Several people smoked on a dark covered porch. It was too early to call her. He could taste fall’s coming.
Rain. A late spring rain at dusk, straight falling. Tender. A little girl with a backpack on her deck in rain boots making paths through the Silver Maple helicopters. A treasure map leading to the edge of the world.
Reunion
The closest we got
was a 2 hour car ride to
camp at the lake
some Fourth of July after
I had dropped out of college
before I crawled back.
Sprawled in the seat of my LTD
Marlborough ashes blown in the
highway wind, he dozed
sweating tequila on my upholstery.
Camping meant sleeping
in the car at night
for an hour between bottle rocket fights
and water skiing
behind a fat-assed pontoon boat.
He worked double shifts for AMF
making more money
than my father ever would.
“Do you remember the day
our draft numbers
were first read on TV?
I would have died first,” he told me.
We were only sophomores in high school
that day we watched
in 1971. We didn’t follow
anyone to Asia.
Catholic school brought us all together. “No, Sister. I don’t speak Spanish. I speak Mexican,” he told his second 1st grade teacher. She was the only one who smiled. Together.
My mother warned me of them later, when we shared a little league team. He taught me to swear in his tongue. I shared the Italian version. Sister never knew.
An old aunt once told me that Disneyland opened the year I was born . . . the closest I would get to that world was watching Mary Poppins at the Paramount where mom sent us to avoid being blinded by the lunar eclipse. He couldn’t afford to go. I met him later at the park to shag flies. Together
That Monday, we served early Mass for Monsignor. Latin Mass for the old women who spoke their rosaries in whispers, rising and kneeling in arthritic unison, accepting bits of host on shriveled tongues. Leaving the church with wetted fingers signing themselves in some hope.
He passed out in the sun on the 5th.
“My people don’t burn,” he announced
to the rising moon.
Sweating beer on my upholstery
heading home from our last road trip.
A woman loved him in Arizona
It shocked him, I heard.
She named their son after his father
so he cried in his pride, “Bless me Father
for I have sinned.”
But Sister was dead then and the
Monsignor.
He came back one last time
We met at a bar so many of us
that August, where my own daughter,
working as a barmaid for the summer,
brought drinks to us. He didn’t know
who she was until he
touched her cheek, her neck,
and she bent to his ear
whispering
while he looked me in the eye
until he could no longer stand it.
Even she knew he would be the first to go.
Spider
I find you in the bathroom
watching the depths of the sink cross-legged atop the
counter beside your reflection.
“I don’t want to have this conversation again,” it tells me.
I wonder how you have folded the length of your legs into that bundle leaning forward, head tilted to hear the echo of the drain? The whisper of a May breeze circling the sink?
I expected tears.
You tap the sink with the end of a brush. It is a hollow sound. “Can we
talk about something else?” you ask.
Four of us, still as porcelain.
You unfold a leg. Stretching it to the yellowed tile floor. Like blowing out a
match, you exhale into the sink. “I can.” I see the side of your face staring at me in the mirror.
“I hate spiders,”
And you blow again into the sink, forcing the spider closer to the drain.
You might kill it there, and leave it like the flies on your
Mother’s walls so long ago.
Left them to harden, too insignificant to be fed upon. She could appease you in
youth. Now there is no one.
My silence
channeled you to sleep splayed over the couch, feet bared extending
beyond the worn blanket. Your face in its nightly pose, the color of lily petals
folded up for the night, the color of the empty sink.
Standing on the Bridge
No sunrise yet. From the bridge rail
a lightening sky
reflects in the crawling river darkness
I wonder how streams of fog rise out of the waters
hugging the bank—a gauzy shawl
my grandmother wore on late summer nights
when she sat alone on her porch. I felt I could see
A solitary egret, shadowed in the darkness,
seeking breakfast, stands
one foot on the sand bar
the other in the river
with tiny twigs of legs
scratching drawings in the sand.
Her head, the hood of a cobra
unswaying as she waits.
Autumn nears with the coming sunrise
breathing cinnamon through the trees too low to
melt the fog. Looking down
the egret has flow. I missed its fishing story.
It saddens me
that the trees have yet
to turn and molt. I hope to notice that day,
and when the egret strikes.
Stephanie L. Harper
Unvoiced
The words from the dream are
Wisps in the air like broken
Spider webs wrapping invisibly
About my face and forearms
The fake sunrise tarp draped before me
Ripples like a summer mirage
Half-soaked into the rural street
And then as if I were not supposed to
I step through and place my foot
Solidly into an evening of dark specters
Waiting outside of their existence
To become what I am
There
I am the cool turpentine
Wash of grays seeping over
A dusting of brown sand in the road
There
I am the night falling upon
Neglected pastures of weeds
Sputtering up about the silhouettes
Of tree stumps and old swing sets
There
I am the street lamps’ sallow illumine
Peering out sensibly from between
Foolish tree skeleton embraces
There
I am still the child
Twisting acorns into the asphalt
With the soles of her shoes
Squealing gleefully into the night
I, Your Progeny
I cannot get my mind
Around the meanin
g of your ninety years.
If I multiplied my age, my experiences,
My life’s richness—
Math not being my strong suit—
I would be making your age, events, and richness
Quantifiable,
As if you were simply
A larger, scatter-plot version of me,
Your number and density
Increasing
With every cycle of rebirth and dormancy;
Repeating
Over acre upon acre
Of variegated shades and shade;
Each of your small, too-subtle suffocations
Receding
Into anonymity
By your sheer enormity.
Even if my calculations were viable,
I would be entirely lost
In the matrix of your possibility.
But here,
Where my roots have taken hold,
Where this slice of sun streaks in,
In this cross-section of you—
I cannot count the leaves
That glimmer golden,
Or burn blood-red,
Nor plot each point of light
That breaches the canopy and reaches
The dank floor.
I am not one-third, not one-thirtieth
Of your richness,
Not even a quantum speck
Of your boundless soul,
Yet, dazzled here,
Neither am I invisible.
I quiver, here,
In your engendering light.
Wise at Thirty-five, Revised at Forty
Preserved like wax museum sculptures,
Erected in their own, obscure enclave,
These two, distinct ages pulled off quite the
Elaborate spectacle—circling
One another in yin-and-yang-fashion,
Gurgling and sputtering dramatically
Toward a crescendo of neurotic
Self-consumption—until the violent
Vortex of their fervent dance dissolved in
A brief instant into oblivion.
Still, I relish the living left to do,
While constantly reliving the living
That can’t be redone, intently watching
Today’s waterfall spill over into
The uncertain basin of tomorrow:
“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace . . .”
Shakespeare was wise to the relatively
Insignificant fact that tomorrows
Keep coming, regardless of how we spend
Or squander, mete out, or justify them,
Forgetting their order, or which ones were
Real and which were dreaming, or whether there
Is quantifiably a difference.
I have tried and failed to live up to that
“Mysterious,” skulking expectation—
Convinced it was my duty to perform
The scenes from a moral composition,
Which I now know I scripted for myself:
Whether I’d tried pink-nosed and dreamy-eyed
To face into an icy, winter wind
(To look like the cover illustration
Of the children’s book, Eloise in Moscow),
Or to bound—stripped down to nothing but my
Bare disillusionment—through the fertile
Valley beneath a sun-streaked, summer sky,
I’d always been shocked to discover the
Dance was neither beguiling nor beautiful.
How did I manage to cultivate and
Reap such a harvest of indignation?
For an age, I sulked in self-abasement,
Practicing absurd, measured detachment,
While swathed in a café’s lulling morning
Warmth, huddling with coffee and crossword.
I once watched through the glass as a curled, brown
Leaf flapped fitfully in the street, as if
It were some willful creature with purpose
And life blood coursing through its wrinkled veins.
Though I feigned amazement, as it darted
In and out of traffic and leapt anew
With life after each self-orchestrated
Brush with tragedy, I all the while knew
(Though I may have started at its final,
Quick, clever tailspin, as the wind blew it
Out of sight forever), and loved knowing
That on most days, a leaf is just a leaf.
If once I rather resembled a rock’s
Unmovable crest, emerging stubborn
And solitary, from a rushing stream,
My ceaseless shadow blotting out the sun
From the leaves cascading by beneath me,
I now glisten and shiver in the
Constant splash of cold humility.
Roger Desy
anhinga
—feeding a brood
an anhinga knows
itself enough to know
the most important thing alive
is not itself—instead
being part—a part
of what it made
of what it was and is
—feeding nestlings
it feeds itself—
later—brooding done
apart from itself
nothing else matters
—after diving for prey
—flocking the shoals
to a single stone
roosting with its kind
it preens its own shadow
undulating in the mirrored glare
—napping on guano
its wings alone
drench dry in the sun—
—come winter—
alone—after its turn and time
—it dies unseen unknown—
no predator torments observing it
—nothing in particular seeks out
or notices
floating—or blowing sand
—feather—quill—or barb
—no calm—or fog—or squall—cirrus
or haloed moon disturbs
even submerged—weighed down by seas
— buoyant despite itself—it’s gone
through the hurricanes
of its own migration
R. G. Evans
Hangoverman
Every day an origin story—
an ordinary man swallows a potion
he knows is dire poison.
The change begins at once:
he writhes through blind bliss,
tears his clothes (and sometimes bleeds)
as the poison moves through his veins.
His strength grows great.
His strength remains the same.
His secret wears a mask.
Everyone knows who he is.
At last, eyes red, bottles emptied
by his superhuman thirst,
he enters his fortress of solitude,
wherever it may be tonight.
His bed. The floor beside his bed.
The sidewalk where he fell
on the way to find his home.
And all this just a prelude . . .
He awakes, having never really slept,
alter ego dead, home planet nearly destroyed,
the ability to suffer his only super trait, thinking
With great impotence comes great irresponsibility.
At least the Drunkmobile stayed in its dock tonight,
waiting where it’s waited since the beginning,
and in the beginning was the drink,
every day an origin story.
The Usual
In a faraway bar in a faraway town
the bartender thinks I’m someone
I’m not. She smiles, arches an eyebrow
and says The usual?
What would I get if I were this man
she thinks I am—a shot a
nd a beer?
Somethng with more finesse?
I wonder how long his usual would last,
this man who looks and acts like me.
I remember my usual and the mileage it got me
though all the time I was riding on “E.”
My usual was darkness and long draughts alone,
hairpin roads and a hand too light upon the wheel.
I pray this stranger’s usual let him fit into his world
better than I fit into mine. The bartender’s waiting,
a wall of bottles holiday bright behind her. The usual?
she says again. I nod and walk out of the bar
into this stranger’s land where a lake as large as the sea
is drying up.
After April
She spent the whole first weekend in the dust,
rummaging through clutter. Animal,
she’d say to empty rooms or to the mirror
as she passed. Beer cans and cigarette scars,
scraps of food and flies. She couldn’t explain
the way some people lived. Memorial
cards and flowers came. Memorial
Day passed. The yard urned brown as dust
by Independence Day. She could explain
her sadness when she lost an animal,
her grief when surgeons left a puckered scar
in place of secret parts. And even mirrors
she found she could forgive—it wasn’t mirrors
that tore her life. St. Jude Memorial
Gardens. Machines that turned the sod to scar.
a few brief words, some prayers to ash and dust.
That was the place that made her animal
softness hard to bear. And who would explain
how tears can burn as well as freeze, explain
there’d be no toothpaste-spattered mirror,
no piss-stained floor, no reek of animal?
He won’t come back. Those words memorial
enough when she knew they weren’t true. Now dust