straight-off-the-sea wind.
and the list read
Bing Bing Bailey Bailey
Bing Bing Bailey.
It always amused my sister and I—
seven days of warden shift
in a rhythmic, onomatopoeic
can’t-help-itself-but-be-a song.
Bing Bing Bailey Bailey
Bing Bong Bailey.
We hurried along the hall
and sang it to you, giggling,
at the entrance to Flat 4,
where you were
officially sheltered
from live-alone danger,
but independent
with your own front door
and wardens, on duty,
at your every red-cord-pulled call.
Bing Bing Bailey Bailey . . .
don’t finish it . . .
leave the song hanging
in our grandchildhoods
among the sandcastles.
Gary Sokolow
Underworld Goddess
Our eyes made contact through a slow drizzle
I bore through her soul, leaned face to face
Weeks later, other disturbances, broken bird wing,
The final descending.
Over past park benches the drunks gather, laugh
With breath of whiskey,
One lost in the gutter, the Captain they all call him
Ass in air, face down.
It was ten years ago they found me three days endlessly
Riding the trains,
Mother lighting her candles believing in small places,
Her dreams of the crisp uniforms,
Men under a hot morning sun,
Mailmen,
All of us, mailmen, delivering sliver thin notices
Final foreclosures like razors,
Petite bottles of French lavender water
For the lonely,
The dirty fingers waiting upon bare-breasted women
To burst through brown paper magazines.
It was in a book we first discovered the goddess every
Autumn stolen to the underworld,
We were children, the family beatings made him
Crazier than me,
We dug through piles of dirt, the shards of glass
In his broken backyard,
Down and down, we dug through earth toward
Our goddess,
Uncovering worms, scared and writhing on late
October afternoons,
Pliant worms below, and above us the stone face
Of a soon to be fading sun.
late evening fumes
at 4 am, it was treasure hunt, channel 9
3 jack in the boxes, 3 crazy contestants,
one winner, who got to pick the prize
one box to choose out of fifty, sixty
boxes of various shapes, sizes, colors, and bows
and that was the show, the remaining time
left to the torture of contestants, the chosen box’s
contents slowly revealed, and for the record
I don’t remember how I came upon the magic
of the nail polish,
bottles snuck from piles of dirty clothes and
missing homework of my sister’s room
smashed into paper bags
saturation
covered with plastic bag
maximum inhalation
every night through high school
and I was always the straight kid
never drank
never smoked
glue sniffer
most antisocial form of user known, they say
notch above pedophiles
and those nights lit with the glow of the tubes
inside the old black & white tvs as I watched
the odd couple, mary tyler moore, the saint,
sleep not so much coming as the haze descending
to awaken 4 am the jack straight out the box.
Any Monday Morning
Often it is how it all begins
the coldest day of the year
a man on 9th avenue walking
in nothing but a sweater,
arm around a basketball,
smoke from a cigarette,
and how by nightfall
the newest associate of a law firm
will admire herself in a bar mirror,
enjoy the buzz of happiness
co-workers buying the next round,
and how by morning the soldiers in full gear,
rifles poised, will have hit the beach,
crash like waves, like kindergartners pushing
and shoving their way from schoolyard
into school, insects climbing screens,
and how it may be 1987,
the man in the tightfitting uniform testifies
for the twenty-third day in a row how
incapable we are of comprehending
the deals made, the true costs of our comforts,
so the arms are sold, our bastard propped up
for one more rigged election.
the whitecaps violent,
the insects hit windshields,
beyond distant hills corporations have grown
enormous, force trees out of the landscape,
windblown seeds with nowhere to land,
the soldiers inch toward targets,
the children move beyond rainbows,
push against something dark and unknowable,
and this the way any Monday morning goes,
the man on Ninth Avenue with the basketball
fleeing his girlfriend’s apartment
with whatever he could find,
the cold seeping through his sweater,
and smokeless by his side the last cigarette.
Elegy
Unknown hard
bop jazz
soprano
sax
runs
feel
to loose
to be
Coltrane
on the
radio
a
long day’s
desk job’s
end
not any life
a life more
fragile
than
ever
my heart
and time
past, time
wasted
and time
spinning
and
at the
center
a man
in
the
ground
is
truth
no
other
way
but
shovels
of tears
and
in the
moment
a
bird
moved
by
the
pretty
day
to
sing
to the
shovel’s
rhythm
to the
dirt’s
falling
the pine coffin
innocence
was ours
was
everything
yet
only words
like stones
as
a
man
the
ground
whom
you
love
is
truth
Michal Mechlovitz
The Early
Wind, sharp, dis-
tilled, washrag gray, hissing
at the shutters, a big
body with a small
voice, its over-
tones smashing the early buds, the
ir cracked
faces, their violent,
lolling needles for
tongues puncture
December. False
intimacy, the chill
pushes their wide mouths open
and brittle. There was
a night when the heat
was broken and the windows
stuck- we couldn’t
close them, and you
brought me cold blossoms
that we kept in the bedroom, cold
blossoms that we kept in the bedroom.
Lumen
She wore a whisper
of a dress
an old pattern, but
transparent
like a cerebral daydream
of modesty
and when I opened
the shutter
of the bedroom in which
she danced
the exposure
of her legs
was the ambient light, and
my camera
the buffer
between us
as she held
spilling threads
in her thumbnails
the details
were phantoms
of ugliness between the non
living frames until
the hem
of her skirts
became wet
with acid
and in lavender
pixels she fell
away
“You are
really beautiful . . .
Do you think
you’re really beautiful?”
Horrible Aubade
With cupped hands
you search behind my collarbone,
dipping a crackling song under
the ladder of ribcage.
I come three times this way.
Undraped, I shuffle
off my pigment. The cut
shine that swabs my smile
with disinfectant,
I have no augmentation now
for laughter, no
aloe to chew
on for it’s healing
properties, and we fold
into a night slice.
We use specialized shadows of our voices.
There is a hum about this skin
lit room deeper than my radio wires
are used to picking up.
Daemons of melodies singe the walls
at the crooked corners,
floor to ceiling.
It is the alcohol
swab, the antiseptic, time
capsule of pain, that we dig up
in stale backyards
I wake before you,
count my pigments, shuffle
them again
and fold the clothes from off the floor.
Mi querido, I will sing you to sleep each night
Hidden behind your negative space,
A tone of white not from this century and
a foreign crease in the paper of his skyscape
What do you find in her glowing hand
that cradled all her misplaced children?
A foreign crease in the paper of his skyscape
folded over by wind, and a bottle of tequila
And what was the cradle for those misplaced children?
Those tiresome winged ones that cried and knew no comfort?
The folds in the wind and tequila sighed lullabies
that invoked nightmares worse than not sleeping at all
And those tired monsters never did learn comfort
but knew the geometry of a perfect sized grave
and how to measure the weight of a nightmare too heavy
before any of those winged ones learned to sing
The geometry of a perfect sized grave is
a tone of white not from this century and
before those droopy eyed winged ones learned to sing
they were hidden behind your negative space
Quick to Dark
The thinnest
line is the blood
line and I taste
it on your tongue.
Darkness is in the repetition
of paint
strokes, in seagulls
scraping
the top
of Brooklyn, with their crying, empty
gullets, I could
blacken your eyes with
my hair, I could
lap up
the ocean really
quickly. I’m
sorry I keep swiping at your eyes. The tapping noise
was nothing, just
a child
on the beach beating two bones
together. I’d dispute it
if you wanted, see, I love you and I’m desperate
to know
where your lines break.
Henry Graziano
Last Apple
Dawn lures her each morning
where she stands barefoot
on the splintered deck.
Steaming cup warming
her hands. A brown fleece
blanket wrapped about her when the chill
demands. She watches
southern tree line of box elders and mulberries
bird sewn in summer’s end
along the unused track of the
old county lane.
Grown to eat the sun. Deer
track from the west
to mill about the base of the
crab apple tree apart from and older
than the tree line,
trunk leaning north. For this season
out of the reach of the scrub tree
shade. Almost horizontal
base for the upward reaching boughs
growing back to the light.
In spring, she smiles at the does balancing on hindquarters
reaching up for the flowers
or later tiny green bulbs,
front hooves running
in t
he air. Fawns
bounding between sun and shade.
Far from the starving of winter
Now, one boney limb stabs back north in October’s wind,
an odd compass needle bobbing beyond the shade.
Bits of twigs standing out.
Static arm hair.
Leaves long fallen
from beneath the final fruit,
a dull maroon dab
absent this morning her waiting ends.
Before the groundhog begins
its daily search for windfall and the
deer return this evening,
she hurries inside for her long stored cache
and throws several apples under
the tree to keep herself from starving.
Behind the Winds
November wind spins the tire swing from the unmoving firth of an oak branch. Grass has overgrown the gravel drive of the abandoned house. Covering the doors and windows on the lower floors, silvered plywood has begun warping. Deeper than the whispering of tall grass in the wind, the swing rope eats away the bark of the limb.
Outside Altoona, eastbound I-80, gouges in the snow lead from the shoulder to the crumpled road sign—Iowa City 98 miles. Yellow plastic emergency tape secures the cab, already blown over with snow. The driver would have had to climb out of his door like a submariner must emerge from a conning tower.
Along the bike trail at 7 am. A rabbit warms itself in the new sun edging into the opening of hedge branches. Night frost evaporating from its coat.
Sunset on the patio of Caribou overlooking the UHAUL sign—the light for ‘A’ has burned out.
In his garden, an old man turns his soil. Jamming a boot to the edge of the garden fork. Across one row and back, blackening the earth. Remnants of pepper plants, hoed and buried. Chopped tomato vines turned into the widening plot. He cannot dig deep enough. The earth does not feel the scar.
Sunday morning, a young woman enters the door of the coffee shop at 7 am. She wipes at her eyes smearing the muddied mascara. Patterned flats grind sidewalk salt into tile as she approaches the counter, orders coffee, pulls some bills from her coat pocket. She props her chin on the cup, warming her hands. Outside against the piles of snow, cars line up in the drive-thru, stop, and drive on.