Blue Moon Northeast

This is the Accompanying Note from a Map to a Mystery

2012-01-16T19:40:00.001-05:00

1. When you go, go alone.

2. Two weeks before you depart, on the night of a new moon, place five grains of sand in your palm and sleep with them pressed against your cheek.

3. Do not be disturbed if the sand has seemingly vanished by daybreak. (This portends good things.)

4. The sand must be from a rocky shore and you may require a magnifying glass to count out just five grains. This is vitally important. Any less and you will not sleep—anymore and the gods may take displeasure at your greediness.

5. Wear shoes made only of natural things—this may be difficult and expensive and you may have to have the shoes specially made. (If you do; try to retain the services of someone from the Sioux or Navajo nations—barring that a good Italian shoemaker will suffice. But say nothing of your intentions. Say only that you need the shoes for a wedding, which is not a lie. You’ll discover why this is so when you arrive.

6. On the day of your departure, eat no seeds and drink only reds, as if you were the unclean and starved for some quenching sangria.

7. On this day, if you happen to be in the company of a newborn, a virgin, or a homeless man or some other sacred being, you might want to reconsider your plans and leave on the next half moon, instead.

8. Be sure to wash your hands and feet before your departure.

9. Take nothing with you.

10. Be silent.

St Non's Rock

2011-10-08T16:20:00.004-04:00

This is a rock. It is a rock found on the path to the ancient well of St Non near St David’s, Wales. One side of the rock is one and one half inches long and flat. It is a hard piece of stone genus unknown.

The rock is three-quarters of an inch thick. Looking end to end, it is a rectangle with one of its points chipped away. From above, the rock appears to have a finger shaped edge as if some pregnant future saint laid her hand there as she labored to give birth to another future saint.

Not counting a small notch-like overhang the rock has six sides including ends. The rock will stand on one side if you like but it cannot on the other side. There is a bit of yellow lichen on this rock. It is blackened in places, perhaps by the petrified blood of someone ancient, someone nearly beatified. There is a rust mark on the rock which is the color of red clay, the sort of clay you’d imagine the feet of a clay man were made.

There are many planes on this rock and to count them will involve an eternity and who, other than perhaps this rock, or perhaps the dead or ascended or the Gods themselves, has an eternity?

One particular side is flat and one half an inch wide but curved on its edge and with strike marks or perhaps wear from the blade of a stone saw, the tool perhaps, of a humble and devout mason, who kept the Sabbath and provided for his family and when he grew older he formed a guild and from this one old mason sprung every temple, every old stone chapel, every man-made salvation.

There is white on the rock, a fading design, once decorated ornately with all the signs and symbols of a mysterious ancient religion, now lost to this world. Lost only because it chooses to be so, for what is a religion without the faithful? It is nothing. Just as this mysterious rock is nothing more than a rock. It is no longer part of an ancient cathedral that stood as a place where voices together could rise up in worship and in awe.

The rock is no longer a part of the arched entry way to a magical place. But be still and do not grieve for like DNA, this rock contains everything needed to recreate faith. This rock is a blue print. This rock is a key. It unlocks the mystery. This rock makes solid beauty. It is the structure of now encasing ancient wisdom and foretelling of sacred tomorrow.

All of this is held in the hands when holding this rock.

A Review of Injuring Eternity and an interview with poet Millicent Borges Accardi

2011-06-25T14:25:00.005-04:00

Injuring Eternity by Millicent Borges Accardi, $14.95, Mischievous Muse Press 2010

A Portuguese-American poet, Millicent Accardi’s second collection of poetry is Injuring Eternity. Ms. Accardi is a National Endowment for the Arts and California Arts Council Fellow, among others. Her poems have appeared in Nimrod, The Tampa Review, New Letters and Wallace Stevens Journal. In addition, she has been anthologized in Boomer Girls (Iowa Press), and Chopin with Cherries (Moonrise Press). Ms. Accardi’s residencies include: Yaddo, Jentel, Vermont Studio, Fundación Valparaíso in Mojacar and Milkwood in Cesky Krumlov. Forthcoming in spring 2012 is a third collection of poetry: Only More So (Salmon Press, Ireland).

The title of this collection of narrative and persona poems, Injuring Eternity, sets up a tension for the reader and Accardi does not disappoint. Injuring Eternity sets about the work of killing time by arranging itself in the shape of a day, with the named sections: Morning, Noon, and Evening.

Just for the sake of mood consider each of these lines:

Her dealer around

the corner waiting in striped pants (67)

Black widow spiders

Abound in the wet darkness (77)

A few moments before her heart crushed

Her upon the ground from a fall(26)

. . .Her

Black pants and uncrossed legs

Against his white fingers were all

She could see of the piano keys (1).

A shadow lurks throughout the book; and the reader remains expectant never knowing when a dark chord may sound. Against this tension, there are poems which speak to the death of Brittany Murphy, school shootings, a make-up counter, Karl Marx (appears in two poems), Billy Holiday, Miles Davis (also repeats), the Gulf oil spill, passion, a carpenter spitting nails and others.

The variety of poems in this book is unified by the voice of the work which is bicultural, bilingual and female. There is a way in which Accardi flips language on its head that brings to mind turns of speech which a student of the English language might use; this gives lines or words a lilt in certain poems, a fresh approach to language. Time, in context, ticks away in flashes and instances; from the child reminiscing about the father or the wife struggling for existence, as in the poem, “Birth:”

In the living room, you my dear husband, my

you sleep: on the worn out sofa, like a child,

or a man who has given up. If my four legg’ed

shadow can crawl past you all will be well.

The Bible and the headstones will rest

with me, buried deep in trampled grass:

it is where they belong. You never gave me

any trouble, dear husband, but you never gave me

any encouragement, either (13).

There is a duality throughout this volume. A duality of tradition against change, of culture against culture, and of man against woman; the gender clash is illustrated specifically here in the final stanza of Accardi’s startling poem, “Argument,”

Like frozen water. We wish, for a moment,

we liked resistance. We wished we needed a cause

to believe in. In this city we keep trying. We hear

The word of hymns on fire.

In this city, we are the Ugly Americans.

As if I were a mad women,(sic) or someone to give

A wide berth to, you slap my face, an action

You would never take back home in the states (85).

In these often dark and mysterious poems the reader, taken into a childhood memory, is locked with the poet in a brutal and inescapable place, as in the poem, “Music Remembered from the Womb,” which begins; “Their music was played/ long before father’s coarse/ face abraded my shoulder, ( 32)” revealing a father’s incestuous treachery. This poem leaves the reader in that place of devastation, with no hope for mercy or redemption, “And I see what he/tells me is true./The unmade wonder/of closed eyes, and the awful, awful/luck(33).”

From this darkness we turn the page to become immersed in a childhood memory in “Blessing in Disguise,”

Ms. Accardi was kind enough to answer a few questions about her book…

BluemoonNortheast: Do you have a favorite poet or style of poetry?

MC: I am partial to subtle poems that do not tell the whole story, that paint a distant abstract portrait of a snippet of time. Like the work of Lynda Hull. I like the mystery in poems and am fascinated by subtext and what is left unsaid, the underlying truth belied inside the words on the page. Very much, I like the work of Antonio Machado, Fernando Pessoa, Carl Dennis, Neruda.

BluemoonNortheast: Janet Holmes says that your poem’s “speakers navigate-between casual lies and the unknowns youth is especially privy to, building, poem by poem, a body of hard-won truths.” What can you tell us about the voices you conjure in this collection and do you have a way you connect to these personas?

MA: It sounds really stupid or ignorant or un-educated but I find myself mostly listening a lot, like Yeats’ automatic writing. Many of the poems I do not feel were written and sweated over by me but delivered through me, as a medium does. If I sit quietly and pay attention, I can get a good first draft, then my job in the next drafts is peeling away whatever does not belong to get the poem on the page to match the poem in my head. So often my subjects and personas are not things I pick or even like but subjects that are given to me. It’s like what used to be called a party line, in my parents’ and grandparents’ time—a shared telephone where someone could pick up the line at any time of the day and hear people talking. Now, that sounds insane too. But I try to listen to the phrases I am given, whether it is through a thought or a dream or a phrase or some sort of starting point.

BluemoonNortheast: Can you talk a bit about the title as relates to time and the three sections of the book, Morning, Noon and Evening?

MA: Every moment in life is precious and the Thoreau quote means to me that each should be savored and lived and not wasted and I hope through whatever issues my narrators are going through in these poems that they are descending upon the time and not pushing it away. As the book came to be a book, it seemed to me that poems needed to be classified either by subject matter or by voice, that some pieces were morning poems while others were evening. At some point it seemed natural to split them up into sections of time, instead of all together. Shifts in tone or subject matter abiding, they seemed to fit easily into these categories.

Do you have a favorite poem in this collection? If so why is this poem your favorite and my we reprint it here?

Oh my. I enjoy reading aloud “Serving” at readings. It seems to have its own dramatic twists and pulls and it is a good poem for those who have ever worked in the service industry to identify with. I also like “Birth” because it was my first, what I felt was successful poem. And “Living Only with the Hands” and “Mourning Doves are also, I think successful. If I had to pick one poem to represent the collection I think I would select “Mourning Doves” because it encapsulates time and the importance of savoring each event as well as an interaction between people and the natural world.

Millicent Borges Accardi's website:

From Injuring Eternity:

Mourning Doves

Have such soulful

Eyes, their gray suit

Of feathers blurs and sinks

Them into the background

Like a creature in hiding.

They hover below the wild

Bird feeder set up for the finches

And harvest the shells, the thistle

Seed casings and what drops after

The finches and faux robins and phoebes

Have feasted. The mourning

Doves huddle and nest in the mountains

Of seed shells and dirt and make circles

With their small bird bodies turning

Into the ground digging a place around

Them as if they were under a shrub with only

The black drops of ink from their tail feathers

Visible. In a group, they lie in wait, their dear gray

Eyes gloomy and sullen and innocent and they want

What the world desires, to be fed and comfortable

And consummated and happy.

The Birth of Little Bull (a villanelle)

2011-06-25T13:55:00.001-04:00

(When he was born the moon was beyond full)

And truth be told to thrive is to consume.

He crowned the water spilled, a son, our Little Bull!

We tried to speak but none of us was able,

when his bright cries arose to fill the room.

(When he was born the moon was beyond full)

A son, on Easter Sunday, the stuff of fable.

His face turned up toward God and spring in bloom.

He’s crowned, as waters spill, a prince, our Little Bull.

He’s born the world is new and life is beautiful.

His bones and blood and heart knit in the womb

(When he was born the moon was way past full)

Rest here, in these soft arms, all matriarchal,

as Venus, now betrothed, awaits her bridegroom.

He’s crowned, let waters spill, grandson, our Little Bull.

Rare blessings seem to spill as from a pool,

and darkness is now jailed within a tomb.

(When he was born the moon was beyond full)

He’s crowned as waters spilled, a prince, our Little Bull.

This is one of two sestinas I wrote for the 2nd Annual Villanelle contest over at Numéro Cinq find out more by visiting Numero Cinq

The Death of Emily

2011-02-05T13:04:00.000-05:00

This story first appeared in The Sylvan Echo, online literary journal.

Dickinson’s Missing Cemetery Gate Found

2-27-2004

Boston (Reuters) – An ornate wrought-iron gate that guarded the New England cemetery plot of the 19^th Century American poet Emily Dickinson has been found at an antique shop after being missing for two decades, a descendant said on Wednesday.

The Death of Emily

A fly buzzes when I die. It’s the sound the life support system makes as I flat line. I slip out of my body and hang around the drop ceiling. I can see the top of everyone’s head. I didn’t know my doctor was balding. He has an interesting strawberry-mark – a little map of Texas with ten hairs growing in it. I wonder if he knows about it.

No one notices me. They are just realizing I’ve gone missing. People run around the room, code blue. I feel young again. I want to let them know they can stop worrying. I am still here—right as rain. And I can fly.

“I’m okay. I made it,” I say. No one hears me.

The stillness in the room is like the stillness in the air between the heaves of storm. And then people go nuts. They use those paddle things. The doc yells out amounts of medication — and “clear” – before he jolts me. They stare at the monitor. I want to sit up and sing, “I Love a Parade.” My ticker is no good. We know that. That’s why I’m scheduled for a triple bypass. It’s five a.m.

Heart failure is a misery. This event is no exception, bad enough to drive me out. Maybe that’s the secret to immortality – hang tough through unspeakable torture. And? I think, as I float above the din. I move to the side of the room where there’s a window to the hallway. A man from housekeeping is cleaning the glass when I code. I wonder if the smell of ammonia tipped the scales.

My daughter will be devastated when they tell her I’m dead. People think it’s the next crisis. It isn’t half bad being dead. I feel I have some place to go, better than I have in years. I imagine my daughter’s face and find myself looking into it. In the waiting room, she anticipates news of me. She reads a magazine. Mary is thirty-seven. Even so, her face looks like a dumpling to me. I want to blow raspberries into her cheeks. Her cuticles are chomped. Her fingertips are stubby and wounded-looking. She absently flips through pages. Is she praying? I hear something but her lips never move. Someone will be killing me off for her in a few minutes. I’m okay; I want to let her know.

“I’m alright. I’m still here,” I whisper.

Thoughts of my body cause me to drift back to my room. I watch the goings on. My chest is cracked open and the Doc’s latex-ed hands are bloodied. He looks defeated. I like to think it’s about me. But I think it has more to do with failure. His hands are poised for a stranglehold. One foot is forward. He’s ready to seize at something that isn’t there anymore.

The room’s been transformed into an operating room. Others, nurses, people who came running when the alarms went off, stand waiting for the clock to run out. Eyes are somber – but no one cries. Experience has wrung them dry, I guess. An orderly appears and disappears in the doorway with a food tray. The window washer progresses down the hallway. I follow. His pores are enlarged, some have stubble pushing through. His dark eyes scan the glass. I think he is worried about me. He and I turn to look when anyone walks by.

The nurse looks dismayed. After weeks together in the town of Ticker-Care we are friends. She lunched with Mary in the cafeteria once. I can see now that the top of her hair is violently teased and lacquered; there are particles of dust on it. She backs away from the bedside. The doctor speaks. Breaths gather firm.

“Emily,” he says, stepping near to my bedside.

I’m drawn on a downward draft as he rubs the wrist. He and I were not prepared for this last onset, the end of one reality. A brilliant light collects in this lost room. “Wow!” I want to say. “This is fantastic!”

Mary’s shoulders have quiet flakes of dander on them. She waits outside the closed door to my hospital room. The doctor removes his spattered gloves and jacket. Coming from the room he extends himself to Mary. On his hand is another strawberry mark, one with veins popping through. Getting old Doc, I think.

This light overwhelms! “Look,” I say. But no one hears. The doctor is pensive. Mary’s face dissolves, “Its okay,” I say.

The stretched lips are an ugly mask; there is a blemish on the chin. Two work on the body. Fat and skin re-cover haphazard ribs before the sheet is pulled for cover. I can’t believe it’s me. I can’t believe I’m dead.

A cardboard box next to the bed holds reams of heart monitor paper. I imagine someone closing it for storage in a basement vault, the marks of a human heart. Keepsakes will be signed away. My phone directory sits on the wheeled-away nightstand. I’ll trade that old life for this new one.

And then there is a fly’s drone, a blue-uncertain-stumbling-buzz. It comes between the light and me. I hesitate. The windows fail. I can no longer see to see.

Erasure No. Two

2011-01-31T22:57:00.003-05:00

~~Here is the link to Numèro Cinq~~

~~When you have for some time used yourself to push and parry at the Wall, according to the Rules that I~~ ~~have laid down, you must, (tho’ ’tis not the Rule of Schools, especially when you push with Strangers,)~~ ~~you must~~ I say, when you push with a Scholar of your own Master, push and parry a Thrust alternately, disengaging, and then do the same Feinting, and sometime after you shou’d make the other Thrusts, telling one another your design~~, which makes you execute~~ and ~~parry them by Rule, especially if~~ you reflect on the ~~Motions and Postures of the Lunges and Parades. Being a little~~ form~~ed to this method, you may, being warned of the Thrust, parry it,~~ telling ~~the Adversary where~~ you intend ~~your Riposte, which puts him in a condition~~ to ~~avoid it, and~~ give~~s him room to redouble after his Parade, either strait or by a Feint, at which you are not~~ surprise~~d, expecting by being forewarned the Thrust he is to make, which~~ ~~puts you easily on~~ your ~~Defence and Offence: by this manner of Exercise, you may not only improve~~ ~~faster, but with more~~ art~~, the Eye and Parts being insensibly dis~~posed ~~to follow the Rule, whereas~~ ~~without this Method,~~ the difference ~~that there~~ is ~~between~~ ~~a lesson~~ ~~of assaulting a~~ Man ~~who forewarns you, helps you, and lets you hit him, and another who~~ endeavours ~~to defend himself and hit you, is, that~~ ~~except the Practice of Lessons be very well taught by long exercise, you fall into a Disorder which is often owing to the want of Art more than to any Defect in~~ Nature~~. The taking a Lesson well, and the~~ Manner of Pushing and Parrying which I have just described, may be attained to by Practice only, but some other things are necessary to make an Assault well; for besides the Turn of the Body, the Lightness, Suppleness and Vigour which compose ~~the exteriour P~~art~~, you must be~~ stout and ~~prudent, qualities so~~ essential, ~~that without them you cannot act with a good Grace, nor to the purpose. If you are apprehensive, besides, that you don’t push home, or justly, fear making you~~ keep ~~back your Thrust,~~ or follow ~~the Blade, the least Motion of the Enemy disorders you, and puts you out of a Condition to hit~~ ~~him, and to avoid his Thrusts. Without Prudence, you cannot take the advantage of~~ the situation, ~~motions designs of the enemy, which~~ changing ~~very often, according to~~ ~~his Capacity and to the Measure,~~ ~~demonstrates that~~ a~~n ill concerted Enterprise exposes more to Danger than it procures Advantage: in~~ ~~order to turn this Quality to an advantage, you are to observe the Enemy’s fort and feeble,~~whether he ~~attack or defend; if he attack it will be either~~ by plain ~~Thrusts strait, or disengaged, or by Feints or Engagements, which may be opposed by~~ Time~~, or Ripostes: if he keeps on his~~ ~~Defence, it is either to take~~ ~~the Time~~ or ~~to Riposte. In case of the~~ first~~; you shou’d, by half~~ ~~Thrusts, oblige him to push in order to take a Counter to his Time, and if he~~ ~~sticks to~~ ~~his Parade you must serve in what Manner, in order to disorder him by Feints, and push~~ ~~where he gives~~ Light.

The Adventures of Ghost Paula

2010-11-04T14:11:00.002-04:00

The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.

Anaïs Nin

Ghost Fargo by Paula Cisewski, $14.95, Nightboat Books

Paula Cisewski’ s second collection, Ghost Fargo, was selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize and published in 2010. She is also the author of Upon Arrival (Black Ocean, 2006) and of three chapbooks: How Birds Work (Fuori Editions, 2002), Or Else What Asked the Flame (w/Mathias Svalina, Scantily Clad e-chap, 2008), and Two Museums (MaCaHu Press 2009). She lives in Minneapolis

Perhaps this book appeals to me because of its story. Ghost Fargo has movement. It begins with the principal characters, a lost brother and ‘Ghost Paula’ the shadowy sister left behind. She is the voice of the poem, ‘This very world, in which my brother holds up//a cardboard sign at the freeway exit ramp and I,/ distracted, drive right past’ (4).

Ghost Fargo is a travelogue. The reader shares trekker ‘Ghost Paula’s’ view of a cross country journey from “Cape Disappointment, WA;”

This shore shall be named

after my disappointment so that

my disappointment can jut out

into the vast ocean.

to “Hell, MI,”

...

That the ocean is endless, yet I will

still be thirsty when I’m dead,

buzzed on the miniscule reflections of stars,

and the moon—that shovel with a face.

Ghost Fargo challenges the reader to note the appearance of ghosts and other visages. Throughout we follow ghost Paula on her journey from crisis and grief, ‘For nobody’s gestures need be inelegant,/resembling a landscape overcome//then abandoned by sea. (17),’ to a kind of redemption (but not really) as the closing poem, “A Wide Open Field” tells:

It’s no use: Ghost Fargo

follows me around.

to a new city, to

an old country:

it lives on scraps

and cast-offs…

Redemption comes later in the poem in the form of acceptance, ‘I permit Ghost Fargo/to follow me around…’ Exacting the human process of grief, Cisewski illustrates that there isn't recovery, only the tacit acceptance of a perpetual haunting.

Themes converge in the layers of Ghost Fargo (winner of Nightboat’s Poetry Prize for 2008) loss, ghosts, death, remembrance; family, psyche, travel and absence are among them. The way these poems tell and interweave and how they bounce and echo from the singular voice of Cisewski’s ghost Paula is likely what appealed to contest judge Franz Wright, Paula Cisewski speaks…with great poignancy and ravishing technical skill.

Cisewski uses device; repetition ‘…I like patterns and/and repetition and winning and punishment…/’ (49) lines and/or words repeat (sparingly) within a single poem, ‘hello? hello?’(10.) Used throughout the text are; Ghost Fargo, no one, memory, death, light, burial and others. Cisewski’s gives voice to a chorus with her odes; this lends itself to the ghostly voice(s) heard in Ghost Fargo. Patterned images and inverted negatives convey the absence and permanence of loss ‘…My Fargo/ won’t admit it’s dead’ (19) ‘In the darkening I lie beside my love./ Steeped in separate pasts,//…’(13) ‘and what if your absence remains/the most interesting thing about me?’(16)/

There’s more to note. I'll add that I followed ‘memory’ in the book; how the dead are embellished, what we forget or cannot forget. Speaking to loss, and in the beginning of Ghost Fargo, Cisewski illustrates something of electro-shock's affect upon memory. It is both a curse and a blessing, ‘A needle/embroidering/the various/extinctions…’ (24.) One only knows what's been erased through things exterior.

I hear folks actually

made stuff up.

Anything meant

anything. Even

all the clocks were

once imaginary clocks.

from “Ode to my Weltschmerz”

In case you read this ghostly story, and you will. I’ve made a list of some things you might want to pack for the journey (below). Also, I had the opportunity to ask Paula Cisewski a few questions about the journey that Ghost Fargo is:

BluemoonNortheast: What is a “Ghost Fargo?”

PC: It is the best re-creation I could manage of a personal landscape for those places to which a person impossibly wants to return: a childhood home or a lost relationship or a former version of one’s self. Maybe the speaker wants to return out of a sense of love, maybe out of a need for closure, but either way there is no return. Also, it’s just a curiously satisfying word pairing in my mind.

BluemoonNortheast: How long was this book in the making?

PC: About four years between its first seed and its final printing. I was in a silence after my first book, Upon Arrival, came out in 2006; it seemed, as it frequently does, that I needed to relearn how to write… again. There were a set of topics that I didn’t necessarily want to write about around loss, and those things were standing like a blockade to any new possible relationship with poetry. So I wrote them. I feel glad I did.

BluemoonNortheast: Your book’s title comes from the poem, “Ghost Fargo” in these lines foretell the reader’s impending journey, ‘I have driven across the beautiful,/uncomfortable country many times//and have not seen him everywhere/” (3) What was your process and/or object in the way you compiled this collection? (which, by the way, works very well)

PC: Oh, thank you. I’m glad. The title poem was originally much nearer the end and was the last poem to find its place in the book. The choice to move it forward was, as you guessed, to ground a reader in a more solid voice before beginning the first section, “The Poor Choruses,” which uses the most fragmented language in the collection.

My first organizational idea for the book was to base it on Dante’s Purgatorio. Almost none of that first plan remains; however, the collection does represent a speaker in a purgatory-ish state; she needs to let go, to exit. I hope it feels like she accomplishes that to other readers besides me.

BluemoonNortheast: In your notes you reference your two recycled poems, one from Wallace Stevens the other Robert Creeley. Can you say a bit about the ‘conversations’ you have in your work with other poets? Who are your poetic heroes?

PC: I am such a fan; it’s difficult for me to pare down a list. It would be thirty people off the top of my head and then I’d lose sleep lamenting favorites I failed to name.

BluemoonNortheast: What style or house of poetry is the most fitting for your work in Ghost Fargo?

PC: Maybe a Winnebago?

BluemoonNortheast: Am I wrong-headed in thinking this book is reminiscent of the confessional poets?

You are not wrong-headed. I love Berryman (Being from Minneapolis, I often cross the bridge where JB sadly ended his life) and then Sexton, and then to a lesser degree Plath and Lowell. I don’t consider myself a confessional poet. There are most definitely biographical elements in this book, and there is an “I,” though I hope that GF speaker is slightly more of a mythic character than the “I” who is writing this response. She’s definitely fictional at times, at least her travels and some of her bravado are.

BluemoonNortheast: Eleni Sikelianos said that, “these poems beautifully clarify that the past has no family, just a self standing on the horizon, surveying the territories.” If poems ‘do’ things, what do you hope these poems will do?

PC: I told a poet friend who read an earlier draft that this book was a bit of an exorcism for me. He scoffed and asked, “How can it be an exorcism? It’s full of ghosts!” That’s true. Therefore, I hope Ghost Fargo is more like a peace offering… like putting an extra dinner plate out for the dead on Dia de las Muertos.

What to pack for your trip to Ghost Fargo:

laugh box

dead folk

clown face

hospital johnnies

broken heart

memory

(the forgotten)

blood orange

comfy walking shoes

your shadow

idioms

a looking glass

From Ghost Fargo:

VINTAGE BLUE ANYWHERE

You think everyone knows

all about a thing so you don't

write it down, don't say.

Everybody does know

about it. It is difficult.

In the backs of our minds,

while several seperate

groups of humans try

to entertain one another,

to be novel or bright,

a similar thought spider crouches.

Consider: the artist who was famously ironic

about being ironic. By each show's end,

the whole audience felt stupid. We loved it!

But some of the crowd was only pretending,

you find out much later. It's no wonder,

when even the family cat's on

Prozac, we're tired of emotion in art.

That antique sadness in the new

inside joke. It's irrevocable, like when driving home

one night, the stranger who pulls up to the red light

next to you is weeping, both your windows

rolled up. You just begin to have a human reaction,

and then the light's green.

Maybelline

2010-09-30T14:32:00.002-04:00

This short fiction was written in the spirit of Numero Cinq’s recent contest. I missed the deadline but I enjoyed this form and I also like the resultant story.

Maybelline

Maybelline wants a baby. She wants Harold’s baby. Lord knows she’s taken a shot at it every night for months to no avail. It’s just that she has no uterus. She’s not mentioned this to Harold. Maybelline believes surely there must be options for someone desperately longing for a baby.

Maybelline’s new friend, Amy, who she met when shopping for pillows at the thrift shop across town, is having a baby. May discovers the white pee stick with its two pink lines in the waste bin. “I am happy for you. It’s just that my period started,” May says, and excuses herself rushing home.

When Maybelline hands Harold the stick, she is no longer

afraid that he will leave her. He looks in the little window,

“Two pink lines, May. What’s it mean?” She pats her pooch

belly tilting her pretty head. Later, Harold makes gentle love to Maybelline, even kissing her down there.

Harold leaves for a trip across country to escort a wide load

delivery to Oregon. May meets Amy for tea. “Willikers,” Amy says, “I thought you were bleeding? If that ain’t some kind a miracle!” “Spotting happens when the egg attaches,” May insists. She doesn’t much like this Amy after all.

As it happens, May’s 20 year old son Jimmy shows up on the day of her baby shower. She gives him a smack, secreting him out the back door. “How’d you find me? You will not ruin this, James David.” He snorts and flips his smoke at her, “What’s with the pillow? You running a con on dirty Harry?”

“We don’t see that little blond gal, anymore?” He mulls.

“Amy? It’s so sad, Harold. She missed and will have no

part of me since.” May arches her back. Her big belly sticks

out. “Why’d that delivery boy call you mamma, May?” He asks. “Honestly, wasn’t that the rudest thing ever, honey?”

May’s feet are all swelled up. She knows it’s crazy, her breasts grow tenderer by the day and she pees every 15 minutes. She gazes at herself in the mirror rubbing

her pillow belly. Maybelline brings her face to the glass.

Harold’s right, she is glowing; motherhood becomes her.

“After you take the corvette and make the delivery,

you need to vanish, Jimmy. That’s it. I’m through playing

Mommy to you!” May hangs up rubbing her fingers through

her rumpled hair. She’s dying for a cigarette but it’s not

good for the baby. “This will be over soon enough,” she sighs.

“The picture of the dead Amy resembles Amy. Don’t she?”

“Nah, I just saw her yesterday.” May bounces baby Harold; his insistent cries hurt her head. “You’re just like Jimmy.” Harold doesn’t hear May’s chatter. Since his car was stolen he only listens to the news. May hugs her little baby hard.

Read the winning stories here: Numero Cinq

2010-09-09T20:54:00.001-04:00

Detail: Dale Chihuly at Phipps Conservatory

After: Three Young Surrealist Women Holding in Their Arms the Skins of an Orchestra. 1936. Salvador Dali.
Music droops to a stop under the barren sky--a startling struggle on this narrow ledge. Oh grief, old glove, I throw you into the garden, escaping now. I place my ears upon this altar of rock. My nakedness thinly covered; head budding petals. These veils of flesh, this hedgerow, this rock cleft speak in aromas sickening and sweet. You lay in places surreal as a fractured bed. A white-noise the static cry; burning loss raises its flaming sun and symphonies pour from lungs.

Strokey's Muse

2010-05-06T12:03:00.000-04:00

Lives in the wall which separates the bed from
the bath & likes to join you in the shower when

naked & wet & without a pen you can only listen-
a shy genius she makes only ear contact whispers

the exact words you forget the moment you are dry
& sitting-wall-eyed-speechless-alone at your desk.

Haiku for Non-believers

2009-12-21T22:10:00.002-05:00

Your notion of psychosis

Acquiesces to my construct of poetry

Astonishing spirit flies

Travel

2009-09-17T11:58:00.001-04:00

I am building a bridge to close a gulf in the night
rickety boards held up by nothing more than my
steps on them. When there is no light I must use
my other senses. Feel me reach for you over the
inky water. Let the breeze of my fall
from the planet move your hair. Walk with
me fearlessly. Let our faces, give the moon a
place to reflect when she is disappearing. As
we know she is never gone. Oh occupation!
Lifetime endeavor! Join me as I travel brightly
the un-certaintude of the happy yes of loss.

Memory

2009-06-08T10:41:00.002-04:00

II
At about the height of the tree tops,
my flying coach chuckled at me when
I told her I’d always believed I’d need
actual wings to fly. “Solar plexus,
Solar plexus.” She whispered.

IX
She was too young
when a man took her innocence.
When she got it back,
it was broken.

LII
Wind blown curtain,
paint brush, budding forsythia,
whistling tea kettle.
What did I come in here for?

Farewell

2009-05-25T15:24:00.004-04:00

Before we left Oswiecim and went to work elsewhere for the devil and we left you to play your sweet clarinet for those officer’s parties and decampment marches. Six of us said a Novena and made a promise in the bunker you built. Remember that sweet German marmalade, Albert? And those cups of tepid soup we brought to you those August nights? I remember your ready smile and broad hands. How capable you were with a carpenter’s tools. We were, each of us, around 19 years old in September of 1944. Karol said you reminded him of his kid brother the stubborn mass of your young muscles despite the wear of starvation and slave labor you endured. You heartened us, my friend, and we loved you as we did another tortured Jew. And in that place where you worked alone those hot afternoons, in that bunker that we built together intended to protect the SS in case of an airraid; the rest of us, we gathered and Bronislow wrote our names and prisoner numbers on a scrap of paper that Karol ripped from an empty cement bag. We used the pencil left by a visiting inspector and there where you hid the evidence of the food we'd stolen for you, the jelly jars and soups tins. There in the cement wall, inside an old vinegar bottle, after we said a prayer for survival, and if nothing else remembrance of our young lives. We secreted that scrolled paper after adding your name, Albert Veissid, and A12063, your prisoner number.

Virtual Book Tour: On the Hood of a Cutlass Supreme

2009-05-06T07:55:00.011-04:00

Shaindel Beers is a teacher, a poet, a mid-westerner, and she’s a friend of mine. I am excited to host Ms. Beers on her whirlwind virtual book tour “On the Hood of a Cutlass Supreme” wherein she is presenting her first book of poems from Salt, “A Brief History of Time” released in February of 2009.

Shaindel Beers earned a Master of Arts from the University of Chicago in 2000 and her Master of Fine Arts in poetry from Vermont College in 2005, where I met her. Her startling new book is a dense collection of time travel which carries the reader not only through decades and centuries but it also spans the geography and psychology that is a young woman’s life. And though she is only 32 years old, Ms Beers’ life, one could say, seems as densely packed and successful, as her first book of poems. Shaindel Beers lives in Oregon with her husband Lee, teaches several English, poetry and creative writing classes, fits in some farm work, a little personal training, hosts an online radio show “Translated By” and is the poetry editor for “Contray,” poetry and fiction webzine. Ms Beers is also the poetry reviewer for “Bookslut” an online monthly devoted to literature.

In, “A Brief History of Time,” Beers deftly blends such incongruent elements as love and samurai. Her poetic voice is frank and multifaceted. She tells her life’s stories while enchanting the reader with her use of language, form, imagery, stunning emotional insight and social empathy. This first book, composed over a ten-year period includes award-winning poems, a wide range of styles: sestinas, plainsong, free verse, and the exotic ghazal. Beers' poems give voice to a range of characters, from the pedestrian to the sublime. Through this poetry, we see the world from a virtuous and honest narrator, as in the poem “Return,” "I lived there, and now I need to go back, feel my legs merge again into fins/ and swim through time. Have tea with the Lady of the Lake,/ laugh with the sirens at their stories. Shudder at tales of/ strange men cutting holes to the realm above."

Shaindel Beers' second book is a work in progress, forthcoming from Salt, and tentatively titled “The Children’s War.”

I had the opportunity to ask Shaindel a few questions about, “A Brief History of Time:”

Bluemoon Northeast: Your book’s title comes from the poem, “A Brief History of Time,” an appropriate title for this collection in which time recurs as a theme: “for the nine o’clock break (6),” “songs from my childhood sprang back..(31),” “because I have you this weekend..(61)…” There are many examples of time references in this collection. Can you say a bit about time and how it emerged as a theme in this collection?

Shaindel Beers: I think of time as something that we can’t escape. When we come into the world we are given a birth date and when we are buried (if we are buried) on our tombstone there is a birth and a death date with a dash to represent everything that happened in the interim. That dash is everything. Time is utterly fascinating. Our lives are shaped by it. We wish we could go back in time. We want time to slow down. We want time to speed up; we wish we could see into the future. We regret not valuing time. I remember, especially when I was a teenager, waiting for a boy to pick me up for a date and thinking that the time when I would hear his car in the driveway needed to GetHereNow! Then, one day I thought, someday I’m going to be eighty and regret all the minutes I spent just waiting. As I get older, I realize how relative time is. When I was ten, a year seemed like forever; now, it’s hard to believe it’s 2009.

I’m also a theoretical physics geek, as evidenced by the title of my book (an homage to Stephen Hawking). I daydream about things like the Grandfather Paradox and (yes, in Star Trek terms) the Temporal Directive. What if you could go back in time like in my poem “Rewind” and change these events? Would the world be any better? Would we (humankind) just find different ways to destroy ourselves? Or, would we have good intentions but do more harm than good?

Bluemoon Northeast: In the title poem, we are taken on an odyssey through a history of love that seems random and yet delivers the reader to a very deliberate location. Tell me about this poem.

Shaindel Beers: I wrote this poem while studying with Richard Jackson at Vermont College, now Vermont College of Fine Arts. Rick is a great associative poet. He asked me to look at other poets who write this way: Dean Young, Robert Bly (the father of Leaping Poetry), and many Eastern European poets who write this type of poem. If you’re not sure what I mean, think of stream of consciousness in prose. I began writing about love—specifically, the crumbling of my first marriage—and then I started thinking about other times’ and cultures’ concepts of love.

It was a fun poem to write. Anything that popped into my mind I went with, without self-editing. I did research the poem; thank G-d for Google! I went from marriage being a war of attrition to wondering about warriors. I’ve always been fascinated by the samurai. I studied various classes of samurai. I thought about how my (romantic) relationships with people never seem to work out. I tried to think of what I really love that will be here forever (theoretically, at least). I thought of mountains and researched when certain mountain ranges were formed. I feel this poem took me on a journey more than that I wrote the poem. I love that I ended the piece with Jenny, sitting on the hood of her 1983 Cutlass Supreme. Those were some of the best times of my life, speaking of time.

Bluemoon Northeast: I noticed that while much of the work here is free verse, there are a few instances in which you use form, in particular the sestina and the ghazal. How does poetic expression in strict forms such as these, differ from expression in free verse?

Shaindel Beers: I think that strict form is a maddening exercise that hones the poet’s skills. Whereas, it’s difficult to ride a motorcycle at least for me, since I haven’t had much practice. It’s really difficult to jump a motorcycle off a ramp and fly perfectly through a flaming hoop, to land safely on the other side. That’s the difference between free verse and prose to me. There’s a lot that can go wrong with all of these restrictions. I’m aware that some of the form poems in this book might not seem quite as strong to the reader as the free verse poems. I’m still sort of waving to the crowd going, “Okay, a little singed, but I made it over here alive!” I hope they’re rooting for me instead of pointing out the burn marks on my suit.

I think some forms work philosophically with their content. For instance, sestinas seem obsessive because of those six repeating end words throughout. I think it works to have a sestina about something obsessive, like love. In “Moonlight Sestina,” the end words are: you, moonlight, real, touch, infatuation, and once.In a love poem, the you, the beloved, is important. Moonlight is blamed for lunacy, which could be obsessive; there is also moonlight in snow, it reflects, hence the repetition. I think we often wonder if love is real, also an obsessive tendency. Touch is an end word for the same reason. I shouldn’t have to explain why infatuation keeps repeating. And I think there’s a fun irony in the word once repeating throughout a sestina. This wouldn’t be close to the same poem if the parameters of the sestina weren’t there.

Although poetry is beautiful and artistic, the sestina (at least, to me) is like algebra. The formula is laid out; you just plug in the words. But they have to be the right words, in a Ginsbergian “each word = right word” sort of way. There’s no room for mistakes, especially when trying to stick to the iambic pentameter!

Bluemoon Northeast: Also can you say a bit about the ghazal as a form and why you chose it?

Shaindel Beers: The ghazal (pronounced like “guzzle” in English) is a hard form to explain. It is an ancient Persian form of poetry and there are certain things that one can do in other languages you can’t do in English. Therefore, if you’re writing in English, you choose which rules you want to follow. For “Weekend Rain Ghazal,” I tried to write couplets with no enjambment and where each couplet is able to stand alone as a poem. I also used the same end word in both lines of the first couplet and followed through using “rain” as the end word for the second line of each couplet. I signed the poem with a “pseudonym” in the last line. Traditionally, the ghazal is about illicit, unattainable love. My poem was written in the early crazed infatuation stage of my relationship with my husband, Lee, so I guess it fits; he was supposed to be working across the state building a fence, right after we met. The rain kept him with me.

If your readers Google “ghazal” they will discover lists of rules and examples of poems to last a lifetime!

Bluemoon Northeast: Natasha Saje said that, “your poems stitch together an autobiography whose questions of gender, race, and class remain open.” Would you call these poems confessional? Can you talk about writing autobiographical poem?

Shaindel Beers: The problem I have with calling my poems confessional is that this label seems to be a way for men to not take women’s poetry seriously. Someone says, “Oh, she writes confessional poetry,” and it means we don’t have to hold the writing to as high a standard or it means that it will never reach the same standard of quality as other types of poetry. I think that a lot of my poems are rooted in autobiography. I’m a firm believer in the 1970s-personal-is-political-brand of feminism. Many women write relationship poems because their lives are viewed through that lens. In parts of the country, women are still so and so’s wife, or so and so’s mom. I don’t know if we’ve come as far as a lot of people think we have in terms of gender equality.

What I worried about most when this book was released were the people who are mentioned or alluded to in the poems reading them and freaking out. I never thought about this as I was writing the poems. I guess I was a pretty selfish writer. My loyalty is to the art; a life is raw material to be used for poetry, anything goes, sort of thing. I do believe that, to an extent. But when my parents told me they had ordered the book, I had this sinking feeling. I thought, “Ohmigod! They’re going to sue me!” I mean, in the first poem, I mention my mother trying to stab my father. (I’ve never asked either of them about; it was something I heard from my brother). I also mention my mother being in jail for two counts of attempted murder. These were actually reduced to manslaughter charges, but such is poetry. But my mom wrote me this email that said, “We received your poetry book, and we think it is very good,” which is not at all the reception I had expected.

I’m slightly relieved that my next book is ekphrastic poetry, where I am looking at children’s art. There will be less of me out there for a while. But I’m sure I will still be writing confessional poetry. I feel like one of those people who won’t go to Europe until they’ve been to all fifty states. Sure, I know there is a giant world out there to explore, but I don’t even feel like I know myself yet.

Bird Lives

2009-05-01T13:31:00.002-04:00

In hand, in ear, and eye, today
not abstraction others craft
cells divide under the blue glisten
tiny robin grazing hard earth is
rolling leaf tossed to dust. Careless
spring, impossible beauty break.

Invisible loss until invited in; break,
spade, divide, worm, and germinate. Today
the world is managed by the careless
with little, if any, logic applied to craft.
This, you are told, is what reality is—
Minute silica stars in soil glisten.

Splitting seeds stretch to glisten
and glisten most before they break
this is what growth is—
the slow progression of today.
Inside a shell a robin craft,
nature seems at times careless.

Worms and caterpillars care less,
twinkle-y rainbow trout glisten.
Algoid synthesize life craft.
Fragile things are built to break.
Cellular hazards of today
this is what science is—

Remember what the dream is—
Love survives the careless.
Splendor endures beyond today;
gold, only gold glistens.
What you cannot see. You cannot break,
the magic art and dark craft.

Mind’s helix created craft,
as anything on earth is—
By night and by daybreak,
as flowers wander careless,
and swelling thistles glisten,
appealing breeze on earth today.

And if this madness crafts a moment’s time careless,
that’s how it is and bird can only listen.
Heart beat portends heartbreak, in hand, in ear, in eye today.

A Work of Art

2009-04-23T14:01:00.001-04:00

A woman’s body is the rent payment. It is a map of the earth.
A woman’s body can be divided into parts which can then

be used in order to name a type of man, as in, a tit man,
a leg man, as opposed to just an ass, man. Commercially,

a woman’s body looks very much like that of a very tall, very thin,
adolescent boy, with tits and no penis. (It would appear).

A woman’s body is found murdered in the undergrowth.
A woman’s body is available on Craig’s List, tattooed scarred,

stolen, unacceptable. Not her, she’s a child, not a woman yet, pal.
A woman’s body is more than you can handle. Is that why you take her

in sections? She is the tunnel from which you emerged. The soft
mountain of your infancy. This is your mother we’re talking about here.

A woman’s body is a place of art, a form of forms, asymmetrical wonder.
Sexually perfect, she belongs to herself like the earth belongs to the earth.

And speaking of the planet on which you stand, that body was fashioned by
the same great Mother who made the work of art that a woman’s body is.

Heart's a Parasitic Twin

2009-04-16T13:34:00.002-04:00

Heart's a parasitic twin,
calcified from the wounding.
A missing rhythm, hardened
other, the broken love story
between the warrior girl who
hunts the captor of her heart’s
imagination and the boy
who loves to run his
fingers the length
of her scars.

My Own Beloved Child

2009-04-09T19:27:00.001-04:00

On April 6, 2009 the body of 8 year old Sandra Cantu was found inside a black suitcase floating in an irrigation pond in Tracy, California. Sandra had been missing since March 27, 2009

My Own Beloved Child

I do not know you but I shall hold you like my own beloved child.
I promise once I’ve cleaned you I will cover you like my own beloved child.

From the black case I lift you and lay your modest form upon a white sheet.
Painstakingly, I comb through your tawny hair, like my own beloved child’s

Gently I hold each hand and scrape foreign matter from under your pink nails
Your tiny breathless nostrils and still breast make me ache for my own beloved child.

I photograph your cuts and bruises, set your twisted limbs aright,
Map every inch of your lovely form as I might my own beloved child’s.

I swab where I must, reassuring you that this will be the last assault upon you.
I eliminate all infection from you as I would from my own beloved child.

Every fiber and hair, is combed from your hello-kitty top and black leggings,
as if I were grooming the lovely angel wings of my own beloved child.

You are clean now, though no amount of wickedness could ever really stain you.
Dearest, you are my angel, my angel; forever my own beloved child.

Dirty

2009-04-09T19:23:00.002-04:00

You turned and walked away from the muddy pond leaving behind what was dirty.
You’ll have to wash your hands a few times more, make sure that they aren’t dirty.

Now you’ve gotten it out of you; drained the sore as you’ve been shown.
It breaks you’re spirit for a time. And for a time you are no longer dirty.

Ashes to ashes, mud to mud. You or her; you had to save yourself .No one defended you. It was her fault; she skipped in such a girlish way. It made you feel dirty

Fold into the 10th dimension, years before a boy is used in such distorted ways,
return and be a different man, leading a girl safely home, shielding her from anything dirty.

Dreams like this, stop with you, as light in a black hole or love in a sociopath.
You buy some candy, lose your dog, take all things sweet and try to make them dirty.

You thought to cleanse filth by sacrificing this tiny unscathed beauty.
Your soul has fled and will not return. You are entirely dark; forever filthy-dirty.

We’re blessed by angels who are unknowing of the existence of such vile beasts. Like the thing that made you dark, beyond all sense of dirty.

Minor angels rise to divinity, to exceed our wanting grasp. They comfort us with profound and graceful wings these beings spared this world, who dwell forever untouched, beyond the realm and awareness of a death which longs to make them, like you, dirty.

Missing

2009-04-08T08:39:00.002-04:00

I first ran away when I was five.
Dad sat on the stoop with a grave goodbye,
respecting my conviction; but sorry to see me go.
I packed my orange and pink flowered suitcase:
underwear, clean shirt, Thumbelina doll.
I hoped Dad understood. I’d no wish to hurt him,
but I’d be moving on.
He watched me brave-faced
treading down Mifflin Avenue,
back straight, terror proudly stifled.
I made it passed Mrs. Easley’s Dwarf Irises.
There was that old black lab Sylvester
in the next yard chewing a tattered
yellow tennis ball, a few more doors to
the mean lady’s house. Now nearly
to the corner of Overton, my heart
raced along with me.

I dare not look back, sure my
eagle eyed father could see me
this far down the avenue. I felt relief
as I made the corner by the
Ritter’s house. Now I could let my
belly full of fear and melancholy
heave through my chest and throat..
I bent over in tears, sad to think of
my mother’s heartbreak when she
discovered me gone. The site of the chain-link
fence around Ruth Ritter’s yard –
her father’s vegetable garden,
the swing set, the sandbox built still
with our afternoon imaginings, all this,
filled me with comfort, so that I thought
for a moment to turn down Mifflin alleyway
toward what used to be my backyard.

Instead I took steely steps down Overton
toward Trenton Avenue and stood on the corner,
doors away from the Caliguri’s on the border
of a dozen strange houses. I ventured on –
a slowed car passed my teary vision
on this strange street there were fewer trees,
the lawns were bare, the hedges overgrown.
Aging Victorian homes in need of paint,
their dark eyed windows, advanced my small
feet. When I reached a familiar house on the corner
of Trenton and Hutchinson. The Bailey sister’s
who sold their homemade cookies
and who I often visited, “Mom says I can’t ask.
But if you offer, I can have a cookie.”
I didn’t know this alternate route
to the Bailey’s. The back of their house
was kitty-corner to my old place. I’d traveled
this long and far, only to find myself
nearly home again.
I felt sure my Dad would laugh
at me when he saw me turn the corner
Of Hutchinson onto Mifflin Avenue,
instead he welcomed me as if I was
returned from a long and arduous journey
with hugs and celebration.

The second time I left home
I was 17, pregnant, and upset with my
siblings. They were hassling me
in efforts to influence certain choices
I was about to make. I’d left Mifflin
Avenue in whirl of tears and drama
for the apartment of a public health nurse
who lived in an un-familiar part of town,
there were tenements, two and three
family homes, parked cars lining the street
curbs and no trees. My father discovered
my whereabouts and called me wanting to
visit for a talk. He was considerate toward
me and respectful in a way that confused me.
I thought he’d be angry with me.
We sat together in the dingy kitchen of
this strange apartment. I cried and so did
my father when he asked me to come home,
assuring me that no one would be bothering
me with opinions about my plans or my baby.

When at eighteen I gave birth to a daughter.
It was dad who was my coach that long
life altering night. A father of five, he had
never seen a woman in labor. He later told
my mother if he had been with her for one
childbirth, she never would have had a
second child. I am unable to recall his
words when he met his new grandchild
yet more than thirty years later I can
see his blissful face as they wheeled my
swaddled daughter and me on a gurney
from the delivery room to meet him.

On father’s day, just fifteen months later,
I watched dad leave Mifflin Avenue in the
ambulance I’d summoned there. I yelled at
curious neighbors to stop staring and to go
back in their houses. My lately walking
daughter clung to my leg. Here was my remarkable
dad, fallen. I was protective yet helpless to shield
him from his fate. Dad never returned to Mifflin
Avenue and somehow, I too, have been missing since.

Landmark

2009-04-06T21:27:00.002-04:00

Landmark is a small college in Putney, Vermont.
The men and women who study there
compare it to a beacon – a sign of land,
after years in a baffling academic sea.
Pedestrian learners aren’t admitted here.

Students bear the badges of ADD/HD,
Aspergers-Syndrome, Nonverbal Learning
Difference and Dyslexia. It’s unfortunate
we commoners can’t share this campus.
We’d likely discover startling things
about learning, the world, and ourselves.

Some travelers view lighthouses as quaint attractions.
My friend collects miniatures, Currituck Beach,
Bloody point, Bodie Island Light, conical replicas of
the seafarer’s solace. Putney is an inland village, but the
Landmark campus draws international travelers, who know,
just as their ancestors once lost at sea knew, they will
find their own way, if given a light to follow ashore.

Outsider

2009-04-03T20:46:00.003-04:00

“...if thou subdue the thunders to a tone of murmurous gentleness, and taste the sweet, love-rippling features of the river at thy feet.”
Kalidasa

Orcaella Brevirostris

It’s said that when the little queen walked barefoot on the delta, she made a trail of blossoms from the hedgerow to the sea. Others insist the deep blue shade of Iravati’s blood colored the river, touched the sky and the river-dolphin’s hide. Born, Kasyapa’s grandchild, and like that creature: her eyes open, mouth of pearly teeth and thin skin.

My family visits a water show to witness a dolphin called Sapphire, throw her sleek body toward the sun and through a flaming hoop. A spout opens and saltwater spills from my eyes, not melancholy or some feigned emotion, instead a cellular

recollection awakes in me. I was privy to a sacred telling by this silent mammal. A history we shared yet could not speak. (As the way to fly in dreams is a matter of remembering.) Tourists visiting the Mangrove forest often doubt the yarns of local

fisherman who net along the Irrawaddy river. One, Saikat, looks forward to fishing with a pod each day; he is familiar with individual animals by their temperament and the scars they bear. For a dolphin is tattooed by the map of its life story.

On a day like today, Saikat watches his partners herd a school of fish into his waiting nets. They bound into the air, sending out great plumes of water which sparkle in the early sun. And the creature’s sleek blue skin is glazed with light

and water. At dusk the fishers pay their dolphin partners; dumping a share of the day’s catch into the river. They say the girl queen was covetous the night she left the king with his new bride. Some believe Iravati wandered the sacred river where it

spills into the Andaman Sea, there accounts of Kadru’s daughter end. But visit the Sundarans and you may witness swans lingering at the water's edge or hear the song of flightless birds. We took the children again to view the dolphins. I read in the

park until the show was done, certain my tears would blur my vision to watch the tale my storied cousins told. In the quiet outside I was taken up in reverie of a minor queen whose divinity is not remembered or believed. And who rode a swan out to

the deepest part of the cove where she shed her swathe to swim alone. Or was she met by wise friends who knew her unfortunate tale and revealed the gift of her escape? My daughter says the dolphin’s brain is the same size as a human’s. But the

cerebral cortex has much deeper folds. I think of scrolls on which an ancient text lies and love stories that end differently than told. Just days ago, thousands of endangered Irrawaddy dolphin were seen leaping in great clusters near the mouth of

the river named for a lost princess. Local scientist called the find “a miracle,” since it was thought that just hundreds of the blue creatures remained in the wild. Like the Irrawaddy dolphin, Sapphire and I are hidden, sheltered within a sea change

manifest by an outsider Queen, a secret Goddess worshipped by only a few. Watch us leap the seas and rivers, spouting water and bearing witness to our scars bright as tattoos.

Origin

2009-04-01T13:23:00.004-04:00

Neofelis Nebulosa

The conditions of a solitary bird are five: First that it flies to the highest point. Second that it does not seek after company; not even its own kind. Third, that it aims its beak to the wind. Fourth, that it has no definite color. Fifth that it sings very sweetly.
(John of the Cross: Sayings of Light and Love)

To begin it was thought she was
bird: raven, or solitary spotted owl.

Next, her tree dwelling ways;
how she slunk under branches or
lunged headlong down tree trunks.
Of this it was said simply: squirrel.

Perhaps not fauna at all...theories grew.
This coat of gray elliptic shadows
and the sorrow she provokes.
The way she’s poised against
the bluest afternoon sky...
Cloud species: alto-cumulus

Yet hearing of her saber-ic canines
Her gift for balance, her long tail
& that she’d gone mad in captivity:
killing her young; to spare them
a similar fate?

Her prowling of the corners of her keep;
disappearing entirely & for days after
refusing a mousy snack & how her
mate became aggressive even deadly,
after sexual encounters.

I recognize, but do not declare,
this cousin of mine.

Forestry

2009-03-19T14:14:00.005-04:00

Mirrors double
what they reflect.
Hang them only
upon trees.

Love Poem

2009-03-19T14:11:00.002-04:00

Every poem is a love poem
existing only to speak softly
in the mind’s ear of the beloved.

Queen of Heaven

2009-03-19T14:03:00.005-04:00

Brando, on his knees, yells
a woman’s name.
Felt more like a tango,
slim in my dress,
remembering that bus ride
and Hoffman’s palms
on church-glass.
He was screaming
a woman’s name.
Jesus, like other stars,
rose up and whispered,
a woman’s name.

Imagined Kisses

2009-03-14T15:40:00.002-04:00

Imagined kisses recall and project.
Reincarnating past kisses, mixing

with future kisses. Imagined kisses
are almost and they buzz there.

Imagined kisses are everywhere
and anything you’ve got in mind.

Make them and take them.
Read these lips; you wrote them.

When you see these lips, imagine kisses.

(Blushing Butterfly, Reduction Print by Jessica Stuart Harris) Real Kisses

2009-03-14T15:10:00.006-04:00

Real kisses in the tongue-tied darkness
expectant brushing lids and lashes

Fumbling lips licked stretch to meet
chins knock beneath urgent tongues

Real kisses in the awkwardness
of sheets and ravaged pillows.

Real kisses blaze a path for fingertips,
spill amid rustling, above the chafe of denim.

Real kisses are unimaginable.

Michael

2009-03-12T13:51:00.005-04:00

The apartment walls were stark white, the carpet and your hair
the same auburn. Reds were big then, like your bloody anger
over tomato soup. How long and lean and cool you were. Steely eyes
and icy attitude topped with hot: hair, head, and pursuit of passion.
Michael the enigma, my nemesis, the electric switch of my libido,
you could beat me down and eat me back around to belief.

When, finally, I left, you held up in my apartment for three days.
I returned to find no stones rolled back, only twisted sheets,
bedroom a ransacked wardrobe, drawers pulled open, every
ashtray spilling over. Nothing hid from the un-shaded lamp’s glare.
To end your rampage you ate the medicine chest – swallowed it whole
and spewed it on the rug. I can see you there, rocking on your heels,

bent on begging me back in. After the sirens died in the distance,
I was left alone with that comforting vomit stain. I drew strength from the weakness of your gut. You couldn’t hold death down in your belly long enough to let it take you. I always believed you fed me. You didn’t.
You fed on me. For a time I enjoyed your feasting. Your tongue sending
hard and soft messages at once. Have other women split in two?

Or was it just the mix of me and you? Michael, Aries of fire, I remember light that shone from lamps you broke, that worn-out couch sprayed with the shattered glass of a framed print, phone call, after phone call, after phone call, the only words from the receiver, “Meg, Meg.“ You at my windows and doors pressing your fingertips and face against the pane. And I remember lovemaking on the living room floor, the open window’s wooden shade tapping in the summer night

wind. The city sounds of voices and barking in the far yard, all of these, lit by the licks of fire between us. Or in the bedroom, convent lights glowing across the street, showing the sisters what they’d missed about their brothers. In those years we were too busy posing to take a photograph. I am left with the tiny silver charm you gave me, letters I never sent and the brown clay pot you made in grade school which is now my favorite ashtray. I cover my knees with the quilt we

once covered with flames. Michael, do you hear my ghostly call? See my press against your window? Does my specter roam the moors of your warm thought? You vowed no other woman would flare you up as hot. Speechless and angry we’d go to bed and awake unchanged. Yet between the dark invisibility of night sheets how needs erased pride and postponed apologies – we rubbed sticks to fiery blaze, exchanged kisses, fluids & places. At dawn the wall between us rose

as if our passion were only dreamt. Michael, are you my invention? Something I created and un-create and recreate tonight on paper? You do not answer. Now a tapping on the window of the summer night wind, the neighbor’s voices, a dog barking in the next yard, distract me. In the brown ashtray I snuff you out with my cigarette. You linger there in the last glow of its embers.

It was Nothing

2009-03-10T12:36:00.002-04:00

Is nothing empty?
Nothing love?
No beginning or end?
Nothing is that did not begin.
Oh nothing, you dark star,
You white dove,
You are everything
to me my love.

Incantation for Vernal Equinox

2009-03-05T12:58:00.005-05:00

Spring is caught—frost cloaks baby crocuses.
The junk of winter’s needle slows the flow.

The poem does not come. We call the laughing God.
The divine hunter whose reckless arrows wound

the thunderclouds. You the guzzler of ambrosia,
The blood-letter of buds, announce spring!

All the walled up of winter melts down with you
and the heavy rains. The Goddess maiden

is on your heels. She reigns all flowering.
You participate in the Earthen Goddess.

You plant yourself in Spring. Under the gray roots
of lightening sky, you make love to her.

Hidden by blankets of air and sunlight,
the grace of desire spills from the cliff edge

of a whirling floral bed. Every living thing,
her stone, her leaf, knows—Spring!

Anne and Sylvia

2009-02-25T11:18:00.004-05:00

Renown like yours is not for me. Let my
words go unnoticed like blood-flow.

I say rot; let worms make lunch of you.
You cut the issue of words not yours alone.

Dynamic manic duo, who spoke heavily
now heavily placed where speech is not.

Do not bother me with your work. Where’s
your latest? What do you write now? As

timeless as cereal box news your words
bore me at breakfast. They are the hard pit

I spit out. Better then warm milk: Wifebeater
at bedtime. Too long a lecture: Lady Lazarus

puts to sleep. I do not pity you. I do not worship
you. Pity me. I live. Worship me. I breathe. Did

she whisper in your ear? Did you in hers? Some
horrible plan to ossify your verse? What death

pact did you together make? What of the sons and
daughters left behind? Or, do you not mind?

Poetesses, my hara-kiri pair,whetting my appetite and feeding
me no more. I'm a hungry child left sucking on her hair.

February Gerund

2009-02-25T10:23:00.004-05:00

Still time traveling
the frozen sunlight
casting a dusty column
on the morning rug
seven below circling the air
nothing exists
animated space disappearing

Eden

2009-02-20T16:46:00.004-05:00

We remembered passion is good fruit,
not sleep with innocence snake.

repeat-imprint-pattern-experience

the doing of undoing
give being history

Unpick. Duende.

There’s a hole in my underwear, Eve, old girl,
the garden was our lovemaking.

I didn’t care apples. You were thirsty.

I gave you fruit, would have given anything,
just kiss. All hell broke loose.

You disappeared. Love was impossible, dreamt, illegal.
Walls flew up. Buildings appeared.

Eden was eons ago. Galaxies apart.
Dreamt before it happened.

Still, under that tree lips yield to ripe desire

and hissing.

Incantation for Candlemas

2009-02-11T11:16:00.005-05:00

O light, your weightless streams reflex through prisms.
Come light, mix with your daughters, water and earth,

reach into the mouth of the soil & pull up the flaxen hair of spring.
Sweet light, recommence! Shine upon your dark sister.

Wake the sleeping seeds of blossoms! Move stones to trees of fruit!
The earth wants moisture. Make yourself a cloak of rain!

That dark girl awaits her playmate - come light; make merry with the night!
Fleet-footed morning bringer, levitate spring, for all living things!

Seep through the numbing wind, we ask your nimble spirit in.
Fiery Light, blaze the furnace of the sun, forge the blade of spring.

Surround our heads: a nimbus. Enter our minds to enlighten us.
Stream our veins. Elevate our spirits! Be with us.

Oh radiant one. Light! Come!

Answers

2009-02-03T14:14:00.007-05:00

You were a confused
handful of soil with
tenacious worms.

You needed opposition
and the river rose
with the gift of thorn.

You wanted gravity like a rock
and the wind answered,
sweeping all around you away.

Your life depended on death.
You tortured yourself
with flowers.

Freaking Love and Other Oddities (Photo by Clare Coco)

2009-01-21T12:01:00.011-05:00

(a double sestina)

Summer barely gave way to fall the year
snows filled up the Truckee mountain pass
and was the sun’s first day in Sagittarius,
in San Carlos Mexico, one thousand miles away,
That the stars bode well the birth of tiny Lucia Zarate
No bigger than a mouse was she, yet live she might.

Elephant ballerinas and ripped men of great might
The Big Top swept her up in her twelfth year,
the greatest star of small dimensions, dona Lucia Zarate
The little girl missed her home less as time did pass
She dined with carnies and wiled her nights away
with freaks born under the sign of Sagittarius.

But JoJo the dog faced boy was not a Sagittarius,
In this he differed from the tiny General Mite
This and he stole the fair puppet girl’s heart away
still Barnum planned a miniature wedding in a year
yet imaginary engagements could never pass
for the likes of love between JoJo and Lucia Zarate

So step up for the nuptials of the Pygmy Lucia Zarate
general admission to bans of these Sagittarians.
The wedding invitation is your circus pass
Have some cake, catch bouquet or garter, any guest might
For Barnum’s take in smalls is big this year
Until the night Lucia and Jojo run away

And on the night Lucia and Jojo ran away
The dog faced boy pledges his heart to Lucia Zarate
They make a pact. They’ll marry in a year.
Back at the big top the freaks and Sagittarians
keep company with the jilted General Mite
And promised him his heartbreak soon would Pass

Touring alone, dona Lucia traveled the Truckee Mountain pass
Locals and miners dug for days to clear the avalanche away
Many souls saved by merciful God in his wisdom and in his might
The engine steamed to life, it left without the lifeless Lucia Zarate
and whistled away under the Harvest Moon in Sagittarius
Afterward Jojo the dog face boy left the side show for a year.

For freaks and oddities through this world will pass
Exhibited but still unseen, as one such as Lucia Zarate might,
Born in the year of the Cock or in the sign of Sagittarius.

Jojo (the-dog-faced-boy) was born on the cusp of Aquarius,
he lived his life in places where it was cool to be a freak:
the circus, San Francisco, and shimmering New York City.
Jojo played the fiddle and raised homing birds,
he spoke Russian and several other languages.
and made his living as an oddity but knew better than most

That the oddest ones he knew were more ordinary than most
Which made sense to him in this strange age of Aquarius
And in a world where difference sometimes transcended language
Jojo thought of his grandfather’s love for the puppet-girl freak
And so after Grandpa Jojo and Lucia, he named two of his birds
And launched them with his secret desire into the dawn of the city.

The two birds carried Jojo’s intention to the city
As if wings bore magic and imparted enchantment most
Upon the slanted eaves of loving possibilities lit the birds
Above the statue of the water bearing granite Aquarius,
In time Jojo and his intended would recall this day as a freak
that love could be spoken in such unspoken languages.

For who and how we love is the private language
of country birds or those from New York City,
Jojo knows that who he’s with does not make him a freak
And to know such love makes him more fortunate than most
Yet even in the modern age of open-minded Aquarius
There will be those who fear the difference of such birds.

The hearts of those in love tremble like the hearts of birds
As they desperately search for an expressive language,
For love can hide the truth or bear it like an Aquarius
O especially when the Scorpion Moon hangs over the city,
And the one you cannot have is the one you want the most,
Such insanity could make an ordinary man freak.

Jojo (the-dog-faced-boy) to some he was a freak,
He built his nest with extraordinary and colorful birds,
His blood was red and heart was as true as most
And he pledged both in several languages,
Gave up his home and fled the bustling city
to be with his one true love in this age of Aquarius.

Some wonder at the freaky happenstance of love spoken in different languages./Or how it is that homing birds find their way back to the city, when clear returns are lost to most,/Perhaps their wings recall a roost upon the granite statue of the water-bearer Aquarius.

Day Twenty-six

2009-01-09T12:08:00.007-05:00

Fishing Upstream A Linoleum Block Print By Jessica Stuart Harris

http://willowsweptreview.blogspot.com/2009/03/bear.html

Bear currently appears in the online journal Willows Wept Review.

Century

2008-12-31T13:35:00.004-05:00

One hundred years ago I kissed you. I am ruined. What good is my life now, without your lips? Once, I could suck the juice of a pomegranate, or lick the ice from the edges of a thistle. Now, my lips remember nothing. My tongue sleeps fitfully in my mouth, awaiting your return. Can I sail the black lakes of time? Traverse starlight and shatter moonbeams to retrieve that kiss? One hundred years ago your fingers lingered around my neck, tracing a strand of kisses you’d left there. Today, I raise a stole of fox around my shoulders & hang in an eternity of longing.

A Rose from Roger

2008-12-23T09:40:00.003-05:00

I have a rose from Roger and Linda loves him.
The cats rendezvous on the rug. I pose before

the rose, before the mirror in dusky candlelight
My waist is disappearing. There is a month’s

worth of daily news stacked by the fireplace.
I burn it—a sacrament. Dumb words to poems—

Smart words to fire—the being inside me tumbles.
The cats murder the garbage, devouring its heart

like fresh kill. I’m strange. I’m wonderful. March is
a wet lion on the lamb. I stand before the lit rose,

the lit mirror, to view pendulous vein laced breasts,
scary-mother-earth-tits. The baby counts my ribs.

The Peace Lily blooms. Vacuuming, I recall Roger’s
rosebud mouth kissing petals, sipping ambrosia, as if

I were tit and he, babe. Roger saying, “How did that felt?”
Roger saying, “Roger is complicated peoples.” I asked him to say,

“Take out the garbage,” in French, and he did. Valentine, the rose
you left presses open in the night glow, it’s secret escapes into

the evening air. Yesterday’s lovers fade. One leaves the words of a
foreign tongue, another’s tiny-self lingers bearing the lessons of love.

Madonna and Child

2008-12-16T12:27:00.005-05:00

A baby’s skull is soft
shaped by its passage through
the narrows of the vagina.
Picture the cone-headed
baby Lord, bald and wailing for
his mother’s breast.
Where was Jesus better loved
than where he was formed,
in the womb of his mother?

Yes to Ghosts

2008-12-11T10:11:00.004-05:00

Lingering on the shoulder
Candles on gray days
The green of rain
Yes to immortals who love me
Stroke my hair – think they made me
Yes to divine intervention
Divine anything—

Flying if only in dreams

Yes to the burning effigy
to voodoo and charka

Yes, I say Yes

In the Eighties (Appeared in Whiskey Island Magazine Summer 2005)

2008-12-05T08:52:00.005-05:00

for Leornard Michaels

In the Eighties, I married my landscaper husband Bert and moved from urban Dayton, Ohio, to grassier Connecticut. We purchased a small Cape Cod home in the not so grassy Naugatuck. I began to long for familiar friends and family.

I auditioned for a production of Orwell’s 1984 at a local college. I felt surrounded by thought-police. Television became increasingly disturbing. Ron Reagan was President. I developed a fear of nuclear war. This began a protracted bout with insomnia and inebriation.

Within six months I knew my marriage was a mistake. I thought a child would change things; fortunately efforts to this end failed.

I enrolled in classes to finish the degree in Journalism I’d started eight years before. There, I made friends in the theater club and the school paper. We rehearsed nights and laid out the paper weekends. I wrote dozens of two-column inch random news bits and one scathing article that ruined the career of a drunken professor.

My friends were colorful: sexually, racially, and morally diverse. They were bored. They were people whose marriages were failing. People who planned to make it big someday, smarter than those “dumb-asses” who got degrees in things like business management and jobs after graduating.

We’d go to the pub after rehearsals or when an issue went to print, drink steins of beer and artfully sniff cocaine from restroom toilet tanks. Empty conversations filled empty corners. We made Mecca of Greenwich Village. We were very cool.

I met a sculptor who carried a weapon. He feared a conspiracy, believing the government planned to eliminate the proletariat. I knew the proletariat didn’t matter to the government.

Locally renowned people attended my parties. A woman named Olivia stripped in my living room and later gave blowjobs in the basement. I wanted to be tolerant and open. I needed the excitement of an edgy lifestyle to balance the blandness I felt deep in my gut.

My Journalism professor was a smart, good-looking lesbian who had a lover and the acceptance of her family and friends. She blew a vein in her neck with a needle full of heroin. I changed my major to theatre.

I worked for an insurance firm that underwrote drunk drivers at deadly rates. I typed carbon forms and collected checks. My coworkers were an earnest single-mother and a drying out widow with big hair. Our gender and need for cash united us. Each day we watched anxious people wander into the backroom with wads of green.

I directed a play for the drama club. Dozens of people auditioned. They traipsed across the stage and read snippets of text. One cried real tears. Another fled behind the curtains and vomited. At first, I took a lot of notes to help me remember people. Hours later, I made little up or down arrows next to names.

A local paper canned the production. The nineteen year old “star” of my play told Alan, the stage manager, that I was narrow-minded and artistically challenged. She said I couldn’t direct my way out of a paper bag with scissors. The reviews in the school paper were favorable. Half of the people on the masthead were also in the cast. In the Eighties, I made the best friends and worst enemies I’ve ever had. Some are some still partying; others have gone on to more ordinary life.

I told Bert I wanted a divorce while sitting at our kitchen table. He cried and explained that divorce was a sin. He was worried about his salvation, not mine. I was over the “God’s watching” motivation for life choices.

In the eighties I used illicit drugs in public places. Drugs and alcohol made things messy. People overdosed. They accidentally had children. I believed naively that drugs helped conversations, conducting hubris chats with anyone about the existence of God, new music; or whether there was a gene for homosexuality. When the “gay” cancer appeared, my friends were straight, gay, and curious. La Cage Aux Folles was on Broadway. There was a fire storm of homophobia from the religious-right.

I broke my nose in an automobile accident. It has a little crook in it since. I developed bleeding ulcers. I was a nervous wreck.

My husband moved out.

I came to believe that God was a woman. I shunned tradition and made sketchy plans to join a commune one day. I slept with people who were somewhere on the gray scale of addiction. I should have been raped, murdered, overdosed and found wrapped in the sheets of my perpetually unmade bed.

One afternoon I lazed around my newly listed house with my friend Alan. We talked about Warhol and Sexton. We gossiped and got drunk waiting for our dates. And when they arrived we all climbed into bed, three men, and me. All we could do was giggle. After taking off all of his clothes Alan vomited and then went into the living room and passed out on the couch. I hid in the bathroom and phoned my mother in Ohio. We talked about her garden. It was comforting to hear about aphids and evening primrose. I crept out of the bathroom to find all three men gone.

The drama of theatre arts continued. I was accepted to a campus theatrical troupe called The Central Players. Victor Dini, the faculty advisor, said I showed promise. He was semi-famous once, off-off-Broadway. The entire arts department admired him. He taught me to work with an intention. I chewed the scenery as Mona in a production of Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.

Because of an interest in cell mitosis, I took a botany class. When I answered a difficult question in her lecture, Dr. Green, my professor, bent toward me and asked, “What is your major?”

“Theatre,” I said.

She never called on me again. She thought I was only acting like I knew something about science.

I was given the lead in a one act play. A cast member gave me a gram of coke on opening night. I delivered my monologue in record time with edgy emotion. A playgoer later told me that my twitchy ways gave the character authenticity.

My classmates were younger than me. They lived with their parents. None were especially talented but they believed they had a chance. They forgot they were in a play at a state university. Their parents paid for expensive voice lessons, wardrobes, nose jobs, and unwittingly most of the drugs we used. I became jaded. Our lines kept us up all night. My friends thought I was cool for an older person. I was in my late twenties.

A lot of gifted and not so gifted people I knew in the Eighties are dead or worse. Four were killed in a drunken car accident the year I graduated. One is a homeless meth addict in Portland. Two died from complications related to AIDS. The guy who had the part of Jimmy Dean pumps gas and rebuilds engines at a local service station.

In the Eighties I wrote dark poetry reminiscent of Sylvia Plath, I thought. I used to believe I’d write a hit screen play about my reckless years in the Eighties.

I hadn’t divorced. We couldn’t afford an attorney.

I took a job on the graveyard shift as a waitress at the Simsbury Diner. I poured coffee and served eggs to drunks and truckers until dawn. Benny, the Syrian owner said that if I wanted tips, I had to be nice. He suggested I unbutton my top a little. He’d scream, “Pick up! Pick up!” or “Monkey Dish! Monkey Dish!” in his thick accent while standing over the grill, his glasses and hair coated with grease, sweat, and flour.

I saw Les Misrables on Broadway, an elaborate production which evoked tears from the audience nightly. I saw Jefferson Airplane on the midway. Grace squawked White Rabbit to an audience of aging teenagers. I met Peter, Paul, and Mary backstage at the Melody Tent on Cape Cod. I visited the Hillstead House, a restored turn of the century home in Farmington, Connecticut. Mary Cassatt paintings hung in a white bedroom with ivory linens and gauzy curtains. And in the darkened parlor—Monet’s Haystacks hung in gilded frames around a sitting area.

After this visit I went to a matinee showing of She’s Gotta Have It. It was a day of astounding dichotomy: Mary Cassatt, Claude Monet, and Spike Lee.

My friends lived in New York, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and on the West Coast. They also lived in the psych wards and half-way houses.

I did the electric slide in high heels at a dance party in Hartford to raise money for the Arts Council. A new poet signed her book for me. She was dating a locally elected official. The three of us sniffed coke from the glass table top on the torch lit patio. Violin music wafted through the air. He’s now serving a ten year term on corruption charges. I don’t know if she still writes. I met other writers and political mucky mucks who’ve since disappeared. Today, other than voting, I avoid politics and poetry.

One night, Alan drank so much Vodka it caused him to seize on my living room floor. He was making the cross over from happy drunk to mean drunk. In the middle of a dramatic argument about his car keys, he fell to the floor. I watched him writhe around and drool. When he came to, the paramedics were working on him. At first, he refused treatment. He didn’t believe he’d had a seizure. “It was just a little black out,” he said. When blood trickled down the side of his face from a gash on his forehead, he was convinced. He swilled his last Vodka sans tonic before being carted away in the ambulance. He’d been drinking for thirty years. He had the weathered look of a writer who lived near the ocean. He signed into the drunk-tank. While visiting him in the hospital, I described every terrible detail of the event. The part about drooling and his eyes rolling into white appalled him. He never drank again. He wasn’t as messed up as other people I knew in the Eighties.

In December of 1989 a friend from work’s son was expelled from the middle school. He was HIV positive. Before that, I didn’t know Ronnie was sick. A few days later, I joined a vigil in protest of his banishment. Folks gathered on the New Haven green. There were people in wheel chairs, bikers, families, clergy. Fat flakes of snow sailed among us. We batted them with mitten-ed hands and caught them on our tongues. Some of the sick were bald, thin as rails. Some seemed healthy as oxen. There were beautiful little children with sarcoma on their faces. People waved flags silk screened with the faces of loved ones who could not be with us. A woman hurried by pulling her children closer. Dissenters kept an anxious distance. We lit our white utility candles, hundreds of flames glowing in the thin, wintry light.

Starlet

2008-12-03T09:10:00.003-05:00

Girl in the nighttime of her attic bedroom…squirrels scratch inside walls and hot cats give infant wails to the summer streets below her darkened window. Under the starlit noise five great hands rise from a floor of clouds…in the center of each hand is a twinkling gem. These hands stand, palms to palms, each four times the size of the girl. Together they bend open softly lit flower petals. The girl is so young, just a child from her attic bed. Enchanted she walks the clouded floor. She is a toy ball taken, a soap bubble blown, a blue egg found, beating. Thrust under by the praying hands, under the expanse of shimmering clouds. She floats the breath of infinity, the sac of waters, and vessel-ed radiance.

Nomenclature

2008-12-01T08:48:00.004-05:00

Some things I like for the
language of them:
Plant cell division
for xylem and phloem.
Catholicism for
extreme unction,
limbo, purgatory,
and Sister Mary Pious.

I could love a human for
vascular and cranium.
And though portent of trouble,
free radical begs affection,
like James Dean
with a cigarette.

It’s why I’m a philatelist
so I can say that word.

Birthday (appeared in the spring`08 issue of Cafe Review)

2008-11-27T15:42:00.002-05:00

Epidurals fail.
Cipher the circumference
of his head.
The answer is worrisome.
anointed into the unimaginable
emergence of life through vagina.
A graphitic history
left behind on fleshy walls,
tags painted inside.
Seen the corpse when
breath is briefly gone?
What of a son or daughter
in that gray instance before
breath has come along?
A fish flopped from water—
blue screaming into pink—
& legend & myth,
a child, a child.

Crystal

2008-11-24T08:34:00.002-05:00

My mythology is of aliens and angels,
large eyed, thin fingered beings
with winged souls whose light overwhelms.

You dwell with the shadow people
in the new kind of darkness,
with those people whispering in your ear,
but when you look, they disappear.

I am a soap bubble,
thin-skinned and full of wind,
an ocean of rainbows floats upon me.
Yet, I am almost nothing.

You’ve married madness,
a toothless wench full of riddles,
“This is the last time,” she murmurs
this promise over and over.

I sleep in a veil of sensuous dreams
and dwell in the garden.
You rock in a cradle of nightmares
and sleep in the desert.

The whole world went bad for you,
under the homeless bridge,
up from the battered dumpster,
You swallow the seed of despair.

Crystal transforms for you and I.
I cup my hands under the rainbow
it throws on the floor straining to lift it
for little Abigail.
I drop it again and again,
to the delight of her waiting toes.

An ill wind blew the bad stuff
into your lungs
and for the first time,
all your colors came to darkness
and you could not be healed.

Lost in Paradise (Appeared in Spring `08 Cafe Review)

2008-11-18T11:32:00.003-05:00

The afternoon daisy shivers

Wander in the fallen leaves

The wind has winter in its mouth

The stars are mercury rolling

Witness the graves

The children abandoned in paradise

weep among the bulrushes and tares

amidst the star dust,

on the eternal carpet,

at the throne of a man.

Experiment Number Five-forty-two

2008-11-16T12:02:00.008-05:00

I knew this woman, some called her contrary. She was my neighbor. I called her Mary. Bill called. Mary’d called him. She said, “I’m getting messages in my teeth. They’re after me and you, Bill.” This woman I knew, Mary, mother of two, ex-wife of one, she called my brother and do you know what she said? She said, “Bill you have to help me, the aliens are talking to me, the government is talking to me, through my teeth. My divorce is final and I’m making a crazy quilt. Oh yeah, and they said you’re next Bill.”

Mary’s marriage was a good marriage. That is, until she decided to improve upon it. Mary and Dave, Mary decided, needed therapy. Dave fell for the Therapist and Mary got the kids. It was all a preparation, like the making of a quilt. Mary was textile, she was fabric, Okay—she was remnants, but she was a part of the plan. Hemmed in you might say, you might say stitched up.

The children you ask? Well what about the children? They were boys of course, miniature men, miniature Davids. And when they went to visit their Daddy and his Therapist for the weekend, the big David asked the little Davids, “How is your mother, Mary?” And they’d answer, “You know Dad. She is acting kind of strange. She’s painting flowers on the porch floor. She’s hanging foil wallpaper in the foyer. She’s painting the woodwork, Dad.” “Frankly Dad, I’m worried.” said the twelve year old little David. “Me too.” said the ten year old little David. “And furthermore Dad, I think Mom is, well—She’s just not well. She’s nutty as hell—Dad, are we going to the movies? Will you buy me an Ipod? Dad, will you take me? Will you take me? Can I live with you?” And the twelve year old little David said, “Yeah Dad, me too.”

Dave went to a Judge, and said, “Your honor, I knew this woman. I married her too. She was okay at first. Then she just kind of blew. I tried sir, my Therapist tried too. And I don’t want my boys with her. And neither would you, if you knew what I knew.” Dave said, “You know Judge, she paints silly flowers on the floor of the porch, she grows herbs Judge, and what’s even worse, when my sons come home from their school, she is dancing in the living room like a crazy fool, or else she is sewing a quilt. Look at her eyes Judge. Do you see them say ‘tilt’?”

The judge looked into the eyes of this mother of two, he said, “Okay, I’ve heard from him, now let’s hear from you.” Mary said, “You know judge, I do this one stitch and looks like bird’s feet, or maybe claws. I’ve stitched is all using just that stitch.” and after a pause she said, “I’ve stitched and stitched, like a mad quilting fool. The yellow is sewn and the orange too. I’ve not found it in me to sew up the blue.” The Judge said, “Mary,” in a most soothing voice, “I’ve a tear in my robe and I’m sure it’s your choice, but— will you sew it? Will you mend it for me? And, Oh, by the way, I’m giving David custody.” And Mary said back, in a yet milder tone, “I’ll be happy to sew it, Judge, sir, I’ll have lots of time, I’ll be all alone.”

It was planned that way. I read the script. Planned and saved up for like next summer’s trip. The government planned it, the aliens too. They called it experiment-number-five-forty-two. And such a relief, they can control women, using only their teeth. I knew this woman her story is true. She stitched in all colors, green, red, yellow and orange too and at long last she stitched up the blue.

The Impossibility of Crows

2008-10-27T12:21:00.007-04:00

The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens.
Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens,
for the heavens signify simply: The impossibility of crows.
Franz Kafka

Amid endless nothing,
formed by what it cannot be,
surrounded by eternity,
which falls,
into lungs and
up and out again.
Ascending to the end
of the endless sky,
which is blue,
only for light's sake:

black feather

Pillow Talk

2008-10-26T19:12:00.002-04:00

Can’t free the art from
this circumstance.

God said, “Too much!”

Love made more of us
then we were.

An ant carried
a gigantic crumb
across the silk duvet.

Yariguies Brush-finch (appeared in Cafe Review Spring `08)

2008-10-24T10:44:00.005-04:00

I tie knots in a blue cord
Suck a black pebble
And frieze your name
In a firefly’s light

There are graves
Speckled with sea salt
and burnt sage

I’ve exhausted
fire and banishment

Shall I sing backwards
Three words three times,

run my fingers down
my neck, forgetting yours?

Naked I smudge
and pray upon glowing beads,
the waning gibbous on my brow
Venus in my right eye—

A fragile heart beats sound inside
New feather floats down to roots.

Vulture (appeared in Cafe Review Spring `07)

2008-10-22T20:44:00.004-04:00

Peace is the
dividing cell
ferocious in the marrow.
It coats the bullet,
cannot be marched to
with signs or weapons.
Peace is the vulture
loving the corpse,
the rising mist
on a mass grave.

It never left.
It pulses
under the noise,
Peace does.

We thought we
could name God.
And we did.
All of God’s names
are God’s names,
even the one
you cannot speak.

Like God,
Peace has every name we ever gave it.
It is upon the back of the cockroach.
Peace has always loved the shiny armor
of a cockroach.

Dressed for the Market

2008-10-19T14:45:00.002-04:00

In odder fantasies, I have imagined myself,
sent through a handy-dandy gadget
which makes Julian potatoes.
Cross-sectioned me,
a layer of adipose tissue,
wrapped in ecto-endo-dermic cellophane and skin.
A part of me slab-like, steak-like, marbled,
with a plug of bone the dog would quite enjoy.
Or possibly a breast section;
mammary tissue resting
upon one of the “C” shaped, paired,
bony or partly cartilaginous rods,
that stiffens the walls of the body
and protect the viscera.
That “C” shaped gift from Adam,
which cradles the central or innermost part,
aortic pump-thing, which makes me tick.
Or possibly a mid-section,
with stomachic vessels feeding
and maybe what my esophagus
anteriorly communicated there;
a late lunch or something swallowed
when the pouch was new,
which never did pass through;
a 1959 penny or one of Mamma’s pearls
which having rolled down my tongue
is now forming an oyster in my stomach.
And I have imagined further and odder still,
the hands of friends, relatives or strangers,
selecting their sections.
Stepping from the line,
hoping for a choice cut of their choice.
They point through the glass display
at a pair of thigh pieces,
meaty weighty cut from a big boned girl.
Me, slaughtered and dressed for the market,
like the cow you never knew,
and therefore do not hesitate
to ask the butcher to wrap.

Symbiosis

2008-10-19T14:42:00.001-04:00

A red flower,
distracted by
a jet passing
over the sun,
bends down
to a motoring
hummingbird.

My Name

2008-10-19T14:38:00.000-04:00

This is my name. Now quiet. This is. This is. Quiet now. Quiet now. Quiet now. My name is yours. I give you my name. My name is under my toenail. It is between my teeth. My name is mother-woman and I am larger than my name. My name is power. It is all the power of the unseen. It is all the power of void. My name is Isis. No. Inanna. No. Gwan Yin. No. Patricia. No. Julia. No. My name is unspeakable. Can you hear it above the cough, the bark, the water flow? My name is nothing and I am so much more than empty. I am more than missing. I am larger than black hole. My name is not yet and I am still waiting in the fluid sac. My name is missing. Who took it? Who took my name?

Apnea:

2008-10-19T14:36:00.000-04:00

This poem
is a vanity: worse than lipstick.
Things are extraordinary.
The moon wanes.
A belly swells.

This poem is technical, yet angelic;
with the word apple in it;
and something about the blush of sleep.
This poem is crafty: a petite point.

It is structured in the breathless dream of night
where the sliver-moon sparks and magic
cells are stars dividing—
sailing in the void.

How Things Go in a Poem-Relationship

2008-10-19T14:35:00.002-04:00

You are the Poem.

At first you are perfect.

I want to read you all night
– a love poem.

Next, I realize I’m naked.

And you are common,
anyone can have you
folded up in their pocket.

I leave you – unfinished.

The Human Element is Fire

2008-10-19T14:26:00.000-04:00

He knew I'd
bring my knees together—
knew these lips
before they kissed trees,
spoke to mountains,
or belonged to another
continent.

And all the Gods were
Goddesses—

Dreamt:

2008-10-19T14:23:00.002-04:00

We’re together in a dwelling appointed
with beautiful details
gilded dressers and marble floors.

In the sunlit grand hall,
I paint over a canvas of yours.

You walk away, wading across a shallow stream

and disappear into the copse
of the far shore,
waves rise and wash the feet
of my companion,
and my feet.

In the afternoon mansion,
a kitten head
tenderly mews on the
expansive turning staircase.

Heartbreaker

2008-10-19T14:08:00.001-04:00

Janis went into hiding
Her hair cut in a bob,
She wore pumps.
and cleaned up—good.

Janis went down
to the basement laundry.
She married a salesman,
who didn’t feel the way she felt.
It didn’t matter—much.

Janis hid behind a baby-belly.
She smoked in secret
and screamed
at her cry-baby-kids
a running-on-the-lawn.

Janis lived in hiding.
She went to cocktail parties.
Her manicure looked natural.
Her perfume spiced the air.
She baked a clam dip.
She worried about her weight.

Channeling Janis.
No one sees my drunken bounce
off the walls of her psyche.
They don’t hear her moan
into the needle at the edge of identity.

I’m a mother, a housewife.
I’m Janis.

Laundry—dive into the sheets of night.
Dust—cough into a tragic cigarette.
Breakfast—drowse in the shattered invisible—
detach and linger—in the rafters.

Did I make you feel?

Cottage Names

2008-10-19T14:06:00.000-04:00

I introduced her to Olga
saying, name the spider
and it won’t scare you anymore.
On the couch pillow,
face stung by the sun
and a kiss, Abigail slept
beneath the fluttering
wings of the bat
she’d named Carlos.

Regret

2008-10-19T14:01:00.000-04:00

He climbed down
from the boards.

Someone whispered
passionate prayers.
Someone slept nearby
— contentedly.

God became a man
in each respect.

Out on the stoop,
the boy she means to stir
gleams by—narrowly.

“Eat me,” he says.