William L. Alton - James Beach - Jane Cassady

Amy David - Justin Ehrlich - SJ Fowler

Joshua Ginsberg-Margo - Rosemary Dunn Moeller

Weam Namou - Bobby Parker - Leah Potyondy

Kathy Walters - Helen Warner

Poésie de bohémien

William L. Alton

Dancing With A Brand New Lover

I’ve only known you for hours. We drink together.
We drink and we get drunk. I love the liquid
feel of the buzz, the ease of the room.
I am charming when I drink. I lie
and tell stories. You smile and look at my face
when I speak. You are intense and completely mine.
I notice the lines around your eyes, the folds of your lips
when you smile.

When we dance, your chest is warm on mine. It’s hot and we sweat
and our sweat mixes through our shirts. My beard is stiff with salt
when we kiss. My hands feel your bald head. I wonder
if you’ll mind the laundry on my bedroom floor.
I wonder where you’ll go in the morning.

James Beach

LSD: Painting an Ex.

My memory of that snapshot (stolen, or did I misplace it? [Like the Polaroid of me and Steve Schmidt, grade 2, our shimmering young bodies in last year’s playclothes, winter outside the sliding doors to the deck, wooden block castles below our feet and a steady innocent expectant gaze toward the picture-taker (my dad),] the processed photo of my first girlfriend vanished from my desk in Santa Fe while I was on vacation…) gone missing is now potent, perhaps mystical, imbued with nostalgia and with a supernatural life and a classic intensity: she was my ex-girlfriend at the time of the snapshot, (although the energy was still prevalent between us for about a year-and-a-half,) speaking with her mother on the Hall  phone, (ca. fall term 1991, maybe J-term 1992,) the faded green rotary wall-phone with the olive coil of cord drooped over wrist between receiver and base; she reveled in the po(i)se, poised to enjoy her trip, posed as though she’s starting to feel the first stirrings of the blotter paper acid, bare, sly face a complex array of actor techniques and genuine pleasure, heather-green eyes aimed into the distance, faded hennaed hair long and dry and broom-like at the ends, dark wooden beads like a rosary round her neck that enunciates her child-like chest, she’s wearing a leotard and gypsy paisley skirt and one foot bare on the worn pale pink lobby carpet, the other foot lifted, dangling a sandal---
---the image holographically stagnant (dead) or alive: Schrödinger’s cat

Jane Cassady

Picking Up Garbage in the Vacant Lot Next Door

I have a strange relationship
to other people's carelessness,
penitent as I am for my early twenties,
every flicked cigarette butt and shoplift,
so as I put on the heavy-duty garden gloves
and puff out a tall kitchen bag, It's not like I'm forgetting
“there but for the grace of whatever it is..”

I pick up a yard of vinyl siding.
The rest of the building material,
the cinder blocks, bricks,
broken stone pipe
will become part of the vacant lot's geology.

Dear Sir or Madame who threw a liquor bottle over our fence,
Yours will be the name of the new razor wire.
Morning glories and wild honeysuckle
will grow over your namesake.

I pick up enough McDonald's wrappers
to fill an over-ratio classroom
of McDonald's wrapper students,
Colt 45 cans, shiny blue potato chip bags,
squeezable juice bottles.
Oh glucose-filled children,
oh men who drink outside,
everyone's just trying
to make a home here,
somewhere safe to watch TV.

Dear lady who feeds the cats,
you've left strata of paper plates.
Red worms scatter out from under
and up the garden gloves.
Last night I dreamed the cats
had gotten under the fence again
to re-commence a decade's worth of shitting.
Awake, I use a club-night postcard
to clean up poop from the vacant lot.
I called you an eco-terrorist, a bird-murderer
but juncos play here nonetheless,
with the purple finch and hip-hop mockingbird.

(We formed a detente with the cat lady-no law against crazy,

but we keep the curtains closed, suppress the knowledge

that she's probably talking to Arlo and Sally through the window.)

I imagine I'll meet my untimely death
when something sliced through my shoe,
a shard of broken windows,
a stray roofing nail.
I imagine the hyacinths' soil
poisoned with roofing tar,
it's time to move, probably,
but I'm stubborn.
I know the forsythia's yellow arms
can reach out and push back some of it,
that the Arbor Vitae will someday be tall,
that morning glories know how to choke
absolutely anything.

Amy David

Remedies for the Five Stages of Grief as Described by Kubler-Ross
and Experienced by Anyone Who Has Ever Thought a Living Thing Beautiful

For denial, try a poultice of parrot
applied directly to the temples-
African Grey, if you can well enough
mislead the pet shop.  Some suggest a blade
of grass tied around the heart or a key
chain from the airport gift shop.

When anger barges in, avoid stop signs
and fevered armpits.  Hang your laundry
on branches of olive.  Enter the mouth
of a bell - your hand as the clapper.
Eat your dates for breakfast, but refer
to them only as Phoenix dactylifera.

In the bargaining phase, be certain to buy
union-made goods.  Trade in your fox
fur coat for one of cotton.  Keep your tits
away from tats and you skin from needles
and overused Kanji.  Cast anchors out to sea
chained to nothing -

Depression will follow.  You must fool it
by calling every course an amuse bouche.
Replace your blankets with the smoke
of frankincense lit with a lifeboat match.
Let the chowder simmer an extra year,
red, white, or yellow, inhale what rises.

When the napkin falls from your lap
as you stand, you may call it acceptance.
There are no remedies then, just a glass
of milk spilt on the floor, a finish line
abutting a headwind, a curtain half-opened
on this stage where you'll go on acting.

Justin Ehrlich

The Mine

By the old abandoned mine
I saw a weathered dwarf
Chewing at the nib
Of a granite pipe.
As I greeted him
I sensed the extent
Of my pupils
And felt unwell,
He said, 'sit here awhile and rest.'
I leaned my hand against his ear
And told him that my brain
Was occupied by barbarous mycelium
and how I had rotted.
As the verdigris loosened
From my tongue
Battalions of red ants
Charged from my lips
Into the trenches of his ear,
I tried to sweeten my words
To coax a retreat
But they tasted of old coins
And I would not swallow them.
He said nothing
Of the violence of sharing,
Just dragged on his pipe slowly
whilst straggling cowards
Took cover in a waxen pothole.
I shook his hand heartily
and grinned at the six-legged spectres
Toiling like gymnasts
In the wisps of smoke.

 

SJ Fowler 
anne frank’s house II
 
we went to anne frank’s
house
she wasn’t in

disappointed
dave began to cry and asked a passer by
to write for him his tears

apparently she was
too noisy to survive
as were our fears

instead I went to the house
of a girl called mercedes
from brazil

in the crumbled sheets of her pod
I wished there was a secret
Annexe


Sprenger

                   and what then
is to be thought of those witches
who in this way sometimes collect male organs in great numbers
as many as twenty or thirty members together
and put them in a bird’s nest
or shut them up in a box
where they move themselves like living members
and eat oats and corn
as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report?
it is to be said that it is all done by devil’s work and illusion
for the senses of those who see them are deluded in the way we have said
for a certain man tells that
when he had lost his member
he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him
she told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree
and that he might take which he liked out of a nest
in which there were several members
and when he tried to take a big one
the witch said
you must not take that one;
                               adding
                 because it belonged to a parish priest

Joshua Ginsberg-Margo

Sith Lightning
(Based on “Greased Lightning” by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey)

Why this force is instamatic
It's plasmatic
It's electro-static
Why it's Sith lightning (Sith lightning)

They told Anakin the dark side was the only way to save a life
(Keep lying whoa keep lying)
Join up with Emperor and end this galactic strife
(I'll get an army I'll clone to get an army)
With your anger and your hate you’ll be doing really great
You don’t need a book or course to use the dark side of the force
And Sith Lightning
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go

Go Sith lightning you’re burning up the Jedi now
(Sith lightning go Sith lightning)
Go Sith lightning the dark side’s really got you wild
(Sith lightning go Sith lightning)
It’s such a shock but sabers block Sith Lighting
Go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go, go

We’ve never seen Vader shooting lighting from his fingertips
(because he chokes 'em, he really likes to choke 'em)
Maybe that’s because he's only 99 percent a  Sith
(he's got a good side, we all have seen his good side)
Catch a Jedi off their guard and you’ll hit ‘em really hard
I don’t understand how they shoot it from their hand
That Sith Lightning

Go Sith lightning you’re burning up the Jedi now
(Sith lightning go Sith lightning)
Go Sith lightning the dark side’s really got you wild
(Sith lightning go Sith lightning)
It’s such a shock when Yoda blocks Sith Lighting

(Instrumental)

Go Sith lightning you’re burning up the Jedi now
(Sith lightning go Sith lightning)
Go Sith lightning the dark side’s really got you wild
(Sith lightning go Sith lightning)
There’s only two who can do Sith Lightning
Lightning, lightning, lightning
Lightning, lightning, lightning
Lightning

* additional lyrics by Noah Margo

Rosemary Dunn Moeller

Basket Making, or The Art of Touching

The rim's crammed off by dried brown willow wales,
eleven inches above hours of manual prayer
that slopes up in layers like a ziggurat,
a work of pride and humility,
a cultural oxymoron in the mass produced
farm raised willows of identical scores of baskets.
The upsett tapers in and then
flares out for eight tall gibbous inches,
until touching down at the base.
Slaths are beginnings, like the rite of spring that i wait for,
watching ditches and fence lines for suckers, pollarded rods
and coppiced willows.

I loved the art before I learned the terms
of basketry that I swallow in mouthfuls, as arm loads
of bundled pine needles and piles of willows.

I have tools: secateurs, sharp and cleam,
and have a use for bodkins, even if
mine're just knitting needles,
my metal stone is a weight from my son's barbells,
my rapping iron, just a cloth wrapped wrench,
and clothespins are clothespins.
But I'm weaving, waling and rapping in an ancient way
with unclutured weeds, overgrowth, wild woman's vines.
The continuum of encasing, enclosing, carrying, sorting
and winnowing keeps me centered, held together.
The irony that wrist supple, weak tendrils
can carry loads of life's paraphenalia
when properly handled, isn't lost on me.


Weaving Along the Aboriginal Plant Use Trail, Canberra ACT

Workshops in weaving, ubiquitous
as the art: dry, strip, wet,
twist.
      Learning to gather weaknesses
into bundles of strength, functional
natural beauty.
      A workshop in Aboriginal use of spiny-headed
mat rush to create a smooth, flexible, coiled basket
to hold murnongs, or pears back home.

Leaves don't look that different
from prairie pothole plants, grasses feel
as smooth, strong enough to break occasionally
with an expletive in some weaver's language.
Foraging and gathering are pacifying
pasttimes, necessary and enjoyable,
universally binding, coiling us into one bundle,
since humans contain,
plan ahead, reserve and save in
pockets, purses, briefcases and baskets.
Until we stay behind in earthen pockets
holding our woven fibers and stones,
bones stretched out or coiled.

Weam Namou

It was supposed to rain today

It was supposed to rain today,
but it’s warm and sunny instead.
I sit on the porch to have my
morning coffee, all alone,
with no one to call my name
to order apple juice or screach, “Boula”
the Iraqi word for urine.

I’ve taken one, maybe two sips of my favorite drink,
Nes Café, a dash of sugar and milk,
when I hear the laughing voices
of my husband and daughter echo from inside the house.
He comes out, carrying her over his shoulders
like a sack of rice.
She is still in her pajamies, holding onto her blanket.

He instructs me to sit elsewhere.
There are bees in the barbecue grill beside me.
I move the chair to another place,
then do the same with my coffee cup,
the novel I’m reading, the journal I plan to write in,
the cell and home phone
I’ve taken outside so that it will
not wake anyone up when it rings.

He removes the cover off the barbecue grill.
Inside a honeycomb has been built.
A bright yellow bee comes to it.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes to pray.
“You’re falling asleep!” I hear an elder warn.
I’m annoyed. It’s an elder who is staying with us for a bit.

He brings over a scrub brush
bangs the honeycomb, then the bee.
The honeycomb falls to the ground,
the bee is dead. A second bee flies away.

I pick up the honeycomb and observe there’s no honey yet.
I think… of the people whose plans are spoiled
due to them being an inconvenience, or for whatever other reason,
to another group of humans who are so mighty
they can, with one bang, change the outcome of the weak one’s future. 

I throw the honeycomb, go inside to prepare a breakfast of cheese and bread.

Bobby Parker

Windermere

In our old flat we could hear
the neighbours having sex.
We had one candle
and took turns passing
our fingers through the flame.

My mother would call by
with tins of vegetable soup,
bread, tobacco wrapped
in tissue – she always looked
like she wanted to cry. 

Every winter I would pass
creepy Carl on the communal stairs
taking photographs of the big turds,
‘Hi Carl, that one sure is a monster!’

The people next door to us were
very nice, they gave us a glass
coffee table – they knew our names
but we always forgot theirs, we called
them ‘’That Nice Couple Next Door.’’

A week in our old block
never passed without an overdose.
And sometimes I miss sitting in the window
watching the blue lights dance
through the railings. I miss
the smell of smack.

Leah Potyondy

Boy in the Box

What was the name
Of the boy in the box?
They sewed him up on a ship at sea
At seventeen
Degrees of turquoise spilling out the edges of his lips
Where the salt
Had made him white.
And when the needle slipped carelessly into his skin
—clumsy sailors, all of them, and what would his mother think
If she saw?  She could certainly stitch a straight line.—
He didn’t even blink.
It was as though he were a statue
Plain and simple,
And the statue was sleeping
While the other young boys played tag around it.

Last Light in the False-Dawn

This is the color of churchyards and lace,
Feathers crushed on the roadside
Gutter-born,
Of women with pearls strung about their necks
Toying with thick white-rimmed rings
Under jet-handled umbrellas.

They are reading inscriptions.

I can still hear the bells of morning tolling
The moment when last night became today,
That inseparable moment that I cried for
When I slept,
And behind my heels some razor is shearing back layers of gray
As ashy gossamer shrouds my face
And teases the path beside my feet
Where white lilies blossom
Like a wound filled with snow.

Kathy Walters
Nevada

a sink of silence, a sky that howls,
gales that score, then orbit, then bore through again
while to the east slips the rain
 
alluvial fans that sag and wrinkle onto uplifted plains,
spring green that laps back, wide blue like a billowed sail,
cumulus that drift from rim to rim, dawdlers of the spent herd

here loneliness rumbles beneath the skin of the earth
like the wild horses’ thunder to a distant range
sustains their freedom and breath

here the periphery is center: from an outpost,
a porch, a long stretch of highway, sky and basin exhale,
silence grazes, the writer draws in

until the jet stream screams again; now fingers crack and bleed,
writing paper curls like scowling lips, the wind sucks all meaning
off bone - a bleached skull by the side of the road

still from this view there’s a tender sturdiness - a steamy calf stands
on ice, a barn spider reweaves yesterday’s torn web, a bear departs
at dawn without looking back – and it’s enough to eke out another beginning:

Nevada - a breathless basin, a mother’s soft belly with wide boney hips;
in summer it brims, in winter nothing escapes, and I too fill and empty with the seasons,

wanting no more and no less than to be contained

Helen Warner

Tomb

When a shadow silences the earth
and you allow yourself to be still,
predatory thoughts come creeping-
come sliding through locked key holes
and slip through cracked floors.
 
When the color of daylight is gone,
heartaches hang heavy before the tomb.
That is the time when grief’s frozen fingers will
dig into your soul, foraging for the remembrance
of names that summon the unwelcome sting.

Those voices that once rang with laughter
are now only memories muffled by time.
And as more time passes you will wonder
if they really could have been at all…
when all is silent visiting the tomb.