Frances Sjoberg
Absence in Ghazal
The patient, extubated, does not speak. His reticence
the voice of one’s haunting, one hears.
—
Narcissus, fixed to his face, quick in the current, is
released should the lake dissolve what it mirrors.
—
To the wind, for the gavel, the clown leaves his horn.
To judge convicts for money, he newly careers.
—
Tomorrow will have been perfect. Yesterday was passed.
Leaving’s participial; but now’s the here’s.
—
And France’s slipped into the tide once again. Monsieur,
too, would sink there, distinct while he disappears.
Joshua Edwards
from Sag Harbor
So European the past is exposed
Some business about a betrayal
Up to a psychological meaning
That is a small airfield now in disuse
When suddenly there appears a glider
On the horizon to end retirement
Or maybe further enhance tragedy
With the suspense of a Greek heroic
A nude locked in battle with a monster
Both just poised on the verge of innocence
Ed Skoog
Quadrants in the French Window
In this pane the gray cloud
is my mother in her housecoat.
And here the neighbor’s quiet chimney
trunk gathers elephant-timber.
I then am Portuguese, spying through a glass,
leafing through maps up sort of the Nile.
Or I am returning home, my knapsack
a jumble of unbearably small jade statues.
John Colburn
organized by good government
In the town where I grew up, the phone rang.
The driveway let a cold sparrow walk on it.
Limestone basements crumbled. We thought
it might hurt a little, to know another thing.
We studied the mystery of the barely dreaming
phone; how its bells traveled in the walls.
I knew the schedule of a motel maid two towns over.
The chronic, lush sound of a county road.
My room was my lifestyle. Summer
went one way, half of myself forgiven
by the phone. Trees became themselves.
Yards waited. We all had to live somewhere.
There in the exposed listening-in of
summer, the phone told its lie, a year’s
worth of crickets opening a purse.
Did we know what passports were?
For emphasis, we added the word
ass to the end of other words.
Big-ass. Dusty-ass. The telephone
rang until another friend gave up.
We lived as though machinery might copy us down.
Our sky could hardly hold up the body of a bird.
I was only a boy. The telephone rang.
The tiny meat of the sparrow’s eyes reacted.
Summer went one way, like an everglade.
The shingles and rooftops became
unbearable company. The phone
finished ringing. Mention was made.
We heard airplanes but never saw them.
I knew the tide of hours at dusk.
The fruit of a clock’s quiet-ass hand.
The rinse of mystery in a six-pack.
In the town where I grew up,
the children made a cloud boil.
The telephone rang. The driveway
let a cold sparrow walk on it.
Anonymous
Ingredients for 10,000
Chocolate Chip Cookies
As found posted in the bakery of the
retired Aircraft Carrier U.S.S. Yorktown
(Charleston, SC)
112 Lbs of Chocolate Chips
165 Lbs of Flour
500 Eggs
100 Lbs of Granulated Sugar
87 Lbs of Shortening
75 Lbs of Brown Sugar
12 Lbs of Butter
3 Lbs of Salt
3 Cups of Vanilla Extract
1 Quart of Water
1 1/2 Lbs of Baking Soda
Shane Sullivan
This Village
Trees break and whisper
They’ve made time with the wind;
I collected dried beans and berries
To complete our meal of crushed love.
The bananas shine out of reach
And a jumbled sun blinds us.
The ocean is a pit of salt
And we lost touch with the boat so many days ago.
We make our memory and tie it to our backs,
We trot our bloody feet off to war.
The woman in front of me whispers:
“Love would be eating an orange right now.”
Lisa Olstein
Man Feeding Bear an Ear of Corn
What we need is an allegory.
What we want is a parable.
What we remember is a face,
a movement of hands like wings.
If god is an absence, what’s missing
is blue. If god is a book, its pages
are blue. Doorways appear green.
Night is a small patch in the distance
where everything swirls inviting—
a place, from this distance, you might like
to stay for a while. An arm extends
an ear to an arm extended.
If you have a hand place it over your heart.
This necklace will not be mistaken for its chain.
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