the frogs were bragging, raucously,
“Wedidit, wedidit, wedidit.”
And three days later, the peepers joined,
“Yousee, yousee, yousee.”
Community
The turkeys, who have been coming in small groups
seem to have got together last night at a meeting
thirty of them coming into the field this morning.
Perhaps they were considering the weather
light frosts two nights and today ninety degrees,
and the dozen little ones.
Who hatched these youngsters in late August
they must have been asking, the answer
plain to all of them and even to me
who thought I could read embarrassment
in the eyes of the fidgety hen and the blushing
of an old Tom’s beard.
When they hear the geese going over soon
they might wonder about joining them
nudged by a vestigial memory that hangs
like a human coccyx or appendix
with impulse to action, fit only for dreaming
of perpetual summer.
Rande Mack
bear
this man wears his shadow like a frumpy uniform
his temper is dubious but he can’t put it down
he walks into a bar and silence buys the first round
it takes the toasts of strangers to divest his thirst
the stains on his shirt are the medals on his chest
the moon pulls his bravado around by its nose
he smells sweat slippery between breasts
he smells dew beading on wild strawberries
he fords rapids running through raging hearts
his passion insatiably pirouettes in the mirror
his spectacles are fly specked and tinted with fog
what he sees in front of him is not always there
his appetite leads him through a gluttonous waltz
he winks at the future as he dances with the past
the toes he steps on limp away from the brawl
his mother once tangoed time out the door
he keeps her estate in the heel of his shoe
clocks pick his pockets when he falls to the floor
bat
this man clings to the underside of over
he signs his name to documents that won’t rhyme
he paints his mailbox with mustard and guano
he plays the radio his mother kept in her kitchen
in the winter he fine tunes crackling frequencies
searching late night static for a taste of hum
his frost bit ears gather the cloudy music of tiny wings
he once danced in starlight with hungry zigzagging women
now his stomach growls as he swerves to avoid the downbeat
this man sprinkles mosquitoes on short ribs and omelets
he inoculates his memories with mother’s milk and rabies
his great uncles sipped the blood of slumbering giants
on whetstones of dragonfly bones he sharpens his teeth
he squints as the moon blooms in fragrant dark corners
he sniffs gasping blossoms he finds quivering in shadows
his dreams are upsidedown and cratered with echoes
the mirrors in his heart are turned towards the wall
he fondles the what ifs of what must be abandoned
marmot
this man is mangled by sawblades of sleep
he wakes up counting his fingers and toes
spotlights fracture the gnarled grain of his dreams
this man is puzzled by the jazz of his own charisma
hope is measured by the length of his shadow
his dreams are branches that won’t fit in the stove
he keeps a portrait of the moon next to his pillow
minutia nibbles on the varnish of his pseudonym
his handshake is a cage in the middle of a smile
laughter is a mirror he shines in curious faces
the shine on his shoes belonged to his father
meaty ledgers were balanced and waiting
he lives in a maze with maps on the walls
he tips the doorman but whistles for the waiter
hunger is an ancient voice in destiny’s choir
his harmonies are stumps on the forested edge
his heart is a blackbird in a frost stippled tree
his fate a tarnished spoon sprinkling his ashes
magpie
this man takes out the trash in his tuxedo
he reeks of roadkill he powders his crotch
he sharpens his creases he slicks back his hair
he struts through the hush like he owns all the vowels
he jaywalks with a flair through rush hour traffic
he could get smeared without ruffling a feather
he is a matador sidestepping wheels in a jammed up dream
he is the only son of a sleepwalker and a pilot car driver
at the end of the road a sliver of moon stabbed his mama’s heart
his heart is an old valley slowly choking with intersections
his lovers with their mysteries and mirrors are good for a laugh
his syllables are waves of glass shattering on shores of stone
he likes soda in his scotch and his eggs just about to hatch
when shadows steal the day misfortune cues his favorite tune
all his cards are on the table . . . face down but on the table
he has no name for the silence slowing upping the ante
nor for the drumroll about to goosebump his soul
Susan Marie Powers
Red Bird
Snow swells over fence posts,
drapes pine branches and softens
the edge of an ax
propped against a stump.
Once a plane crash survivor,
arms folded, quietly told me
how the engine died, the soft screams grew,
and cups flew amid staccato cries of “no.”
Then the memory falls away
and a cardinal, red as blood,
beats wings against the snow,
lands on the stump.
I close my eyes but the rays
come through my closed lids.
Red wings sparkle in the sun.
I remember my old dog dying in my arms,
unable to walk, folded legs limp in my lap.
The needle glistened as the vet’s eyes watered,
I held my dog, stroked the warm ear.
Snow softens all it touches.
Numbing, hiding, icing over
the way I loved a man long ago.
Now days go by without thoughts of him,
yet shadows chase me when I see another man
with his hands: clean and strong.
I have felt life tingle inside me,
and then it bled away.
I cried, unable to stop the loss
of someone who never was.
The cardinal launches into the air,
his red heat burns brightly.
The survivor found herself
holding hands with strangers.
Everybody aboard touched:
lovers, strangers, children.
Eyes closed, fingers entwined,
ending life as they had begun it:
absorbing the warmth of another.
The red bird darts looking
for what it wants.
I stand in the snow while somewhere
smoking fragments burn my feet,
feathers touch me, wings graze me.
I wait for the blade
to cut me;
I wait to fall
into space.
Moored
Every moored boat tugs at its tether,
small waves disappear into larger o
nes.
The dock reaches out, but can’t cross the sea.
I stand on the shore and squint at impossible distance.
When I was a girl of fifteen,
I tied our small sailboat to the dock.
The boat’s bright yellow reflected in the water,
The rope was too short to secure
both ends, so I left it:
tethered at one end, loose at the other
The next morning, I arose to sun on my ceiling,
a pattern of light, bouncing off the water
beneath my bedroom window—squiggles and whorls
played off the painted surface
like soundless music.
Easy, the golden day ahead,
I walked outside where I found
the boat battered into splintered boards.
A nighttime storm had set it into motion
so it cracked itself in two.
Now I watch boats calm and controlled,
and wonder about a rhythm so violent
my very structure would come undone,
shaking apart everything put so carefully into place,
the wildness more powerful than the bond,
the waves overwhelming the vessel.
Can I go back in time to my fifteen-year-old self?
Secure the boat to resist the storm?
Defy waves struggling to undo knots?
Or do knots come undone
as time nimbly unties us from what we love?
Now, with decades behind me,
I send a benediction to that sleeping girl,
who cannot foresee what the night will bring.
Happy Buddha
A stone Buddha in Provincetown
squats among singing lilies and gladioli.
Their summer voices blare orange pastels
in loud speaker fashion.
Buddha, how do you resist the urge
to swing your plump hips to this sunny blast of colors?
Surely, you must rise from that lotus position
and belly dance among the cone flowers:
your lovely round tummy smoothly
undulating in the afternoon sun.
The roses twining the fence
beg you for a kiss.
Maybe a tango would do as you pull their
vines hither and yon.
And before you foxtrot back to your spot,
take me in your arms for a sexy waltz.
Look deeply into my eyes,
and I will sigh as you
pirouette into place,
already missing your strong arms.
Anne Graue
Sky
We were always looking up
in spring; those months so
hot and cold anything could happen;
funnels dropped, vanished,
vacuumed up between the clouds.
The Midwest sky turned
jaundiced and still.
Oklahoma knew it was coming:
the cliché of the freight train,
the stillness,
the mass of moving earth.
This time, the myth would shred
the houses to toothpicks
scatter photographs
and houses like paper shells.
In Kansas, tornado
drills were routine;
I thought we would outlive
whatever hit us; our heads
down, legs cramped, breath
hot above our folded laps.
Carrying my blanket
down under the stairs, my
father’s shortwave crackling
weather reports,
I knew I would not survive
when the tornado hit
our house. Living would be
too difficult, as the living always is.
Her Letter to Kurt Vonnegut, 1982
There’s a place in Kansas City
called Montana Wildhack’s;
I thought we might meet for a drink
and talk about Cat’s Cradle or
Slaughterhouse Five. It would be
nice, nice, very nice.
My sister knows the place.
It isn’t a gay bar, really, but
she might have kept that secret
(she is so used to keeping that
secret); she just likes the name,
I think, and said she’d take me.
I think you write like you know
all too well how humans behave—
the writing is spiritual,
tough, real. (Too much?)
My sister hasn’t read a word
of it, and probably won’t; it’s
not her thing. She leaves reading
to me except for Anais Nin
or the author of 9 1/2 Weeks;
The books were in her room
and she was out.
Earthly conversation
would suffice, not be
the end of the world,
frosty and nuclear—
so it goes.
She told me she was in love
with a woman one night
in an old pickup we hot-wired.
At her friend’s house with a pool
late at night, we drank beer
and swam above the Playboy
logo, down and back and down.
I am sure this type of thing
has happened, more or less; this
may be one of the good times
we concentrate on, ignoring
awful ones. I hope you will
consider meeting me
the next time you’re in Kansas City.
Cycles
Spring hot, yet
it feels like fall—
through weak bones
through clotted skin
thickened and congealed—
jaundiced spring and wild
ochre seep through
flaming bramble; bruised
plum of laden hyacinth,
the cadaver of a grey mouse,
the pinched ruby of a tree
growing, leaning toward pale
summer petals of a shrub flowering
in bells that hang low, look
as if they might reach
for furry mustard & black
pepper with wings—
translucent and spinning—
winter insinuating.
Mariah Blankenship
Tub Restoration
My father says I restored this 77-year-old tub
to feel like Cleopatra but I only wanted escape
from cybernetic ecology, wanted to feel
cast iron cool on my back in the winter
and I didn’t feel like a prince-ss or an Egyptian goddess
in this tub because I spent hours whittling it away.
I dumped it like my own crusted memories
on the cracked concrete driveway, mask allowing
me to breathe nothing from the past
that I am sanding away like corroding bones,
77 years of memories echoing from the drone
of a sander. It took four hours to strip the tub
clean of its memories, to peel the now elderly children’s
fingertips from the sides where they bathed
in democracy, capitalist rubber duck trying to stay afloat
while Roosevelt speaks on the radio and a Declaration
of War floats in the air pulled by little atomies
while Queen Mab is in a hazelnut flying
through men’s noses while they sleep.
Memories are dissipating and lost in the atmosphere
of a belt sander with each medium grade discard,
each rectangle tossed into the trash,
nationalism in a hefty bag, and surely the coming
and going of women (talking of Michelangelo or
Kennedy or King) was lost in the friction as well
a
nd I can almost see one whispering Free at last
Thank God Almighty we are free at last and perhaps
the mothers memorized the ceiling above the tub
while their children slept, while their husbands slept
like dolls. When I finished sanding, I painted the raw canvas
(flushed of memories, history floating through the
atmosphere) with a porcelain white and now I soak
like a working class Cleopatra in a memory pond,
pruning away in the dull dust of humanity.
Utopia on a Park Bench
An old man wrinkled with time,
wrinkled with so many days at
Goodyear Tire, constructing tires
in an assembly line, tire population
in the thousands, communists
on a conveyer belt, arms forcefully
pointed upward. His park bench
is vast like a continent.
He, like Chagall’s wife, corner of a canvas,
consumes just a fraction of the wood
and metal conglomerate, and he
is feeding the birds, feeding the birds
as God, government of birds competing
for each seed like capitalism in a park
with leaping birds, working class birds,
open leaves in the open air of every
season of every year. Equal amounts
of seed pour onto the ground and he
knows there is no solution to equalize
their earnings, to balance the scale
with Marx perched in the middle as a raven.
He knows no socialist solution in his
steel-toed boots and windbreaker
with his beard growing downward
like the droppings of his tears to paper bag.
He knows no solution, only that he
is a giving tree in a dystopian world
and he tried to throw a pile here,
a pile there, one for you, one for you,
but the birds, the birds worked for their
profit, while the man, like God, fed them.
And Violets Are Blue
I am tired of submitting to journals,
society, men, God, tired of watching
my dog cower under my desk
after pissing on the floor.
I am his god after all, and he
is tired of submitting to me,