Midsummer Opera / Sam Calhoun
The days slide rain,
those first runners
down the feeder pole,
except for the clef
of the hooked end,
one drop staying
a fortnight as did you,
only memory now,
slipping into the flat tray
and then onto brown-eyed
susans, having reached
the top of the deck,
and somewhere
someone sings
as the dragonfly
conducts his way
through night
blooming cereus,
ready to clap open
at curtain call.
Tanka for the Poor Sleeper / at/om
Horrible nightmares
have always kept me from sleep
never let me stay
in the comfort of my bed
never was plagued by waking.
Lament in the style of Paz / Brett Gastineau
Through the apertures of the skull,
the name is scraped away,
a rusted husk cast into the breakers
where the foam boils white and indifferent.
I am an absence carved in bone,
a gray geometry of cliffs facing the tide.
No marker rises from the shale.
The sea has chewed the syllables to sand,
leaving only the salt, the bitter skin,
the inland valleys of an un-mapped chest.
The night is another windy mess,
a yellow sonnet filled with
ungentle hands.
Memory is a blind thing stumbling through the brush.
Love, an animal sense, sniffing the air for
a ghost that has already migrated south.
My heart can dream no further.
It is heavy with the ash of an old weather.
I try to remember every breath that has been before,
the angle of her shoulder in the dark,
the grammar of her touch before
the vowels dissolved.
We are provided with tears.
We think they will grow into beautiful things.
They won’t.
Now there is only the beach,
traversed by flocks of murmurs
and this body breathing alone
beneath the stars.
Tidal Force / Joy Johnson
However North-Shore, the cresting wave is
short-lived, crumbling to undertow, to go
back to where it once was before the moon
tugged so mercilessly, so brilliantly,
and water was made to clean the seashore.
Alas, no cleaning hardly any more,
for in defiance of creation, man
makes permanent what should crumble, be undone.
So the roiling waves only rearrange
what unending rubbish man makes of Earth.
Dining Room / Nicoletta LaMarca-Sacco
All the delicate ceramics with curving porcelain edges, faces, trim. Breakfront, lower storage for dishes, one for salad, one for dessert, one to park bones in, one a cellar for salt. Immigrants’ dream of fancy things when humble items were left behind in the old country. Old-world recipes sneak in and are served on the new world dishes, earned one at a time from clocking in, out, in, out in New York, the greatest city in the world full of rats swinging tails under trashcans, workers hurrying despite best efforts to be on time, tourists standing open-mouthed on sidewalks sandwiched with others, homeless people ripping crusts off sandwiches, fancy cars lining up outside museums and theaters, and newcomers hoping to catching the next big thing for their family. Come home, set the table, set out pane cunzato, cracked olives, and scaccia learned from Nonna. Decorate the table so it is less humble. Celebrate your roots. The delicate features of figurines at the table, in safety, merge two places that we call home.
HEAT DEATH / H.T. Reynolds
Doc looked through my skin
but missed her smile
between my ribs teeth
clamped on my arteries
with their gelatinous pitch
working its way to my throat
hammering in tune
with her sharp eyes
her tender leer keeping me
still suspended in a clock
oscillating to entropy
My Winter as a Rainbow / Gabriel Phillips
Where you are endless and captivate
I place a small thumb. I remember
this as a page in a tall book
about crispy forest animals.
Where you can mix green
and baby blue ice cream together
then stand in the snow, wearing a mask.
I pull a light from my belly, to place
it on the thumb. The book isn’t wet.
I see to its needs as the hungry
cobra looks into the cold bath water
of eels beneath a slow waterfall.
To hurry is to rupture as saunter
is to falling up. Neither produces
enough snow; not the tired antlers
or the dove claw clawing my throat.
We are trying to become a smaller forest.
Whose hunger has impaled the walls
around us. And foxfire, burns the mask
from my face, closing the colors
of the green and baby blue ice cream
until the moon begins squealing
until the moon floats away.
