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Volume One, Number Seven April 2010
April Descent Exodus Part 1 Recipe for Creation
Merrill's Cup A Tropical Fruit Olber's Paradox
When the Gypsy Women Came A Love Poem for the Colored Help Lost in the North Side One Year Later
Nightmares, Secrets, and Museums The Sides of a Mirror Poetry,
Bi-Polar Hope The Big Race Sunday
Emma Sky Wolf
April Descent
I agree with Persephone. there is no way to escape daisy chain calamity, Alice missteps that consummated
Exodus Part 1
Leave taking and breathless unleavened sustenance will be my lot, bitter herb, egg circulation of simulated
shed fermented ancestral suffering that page wrinkles out calligraphic back to front displayed survival in the walnut
mortar sticking to every embered inch. Death's oil spill dove wings fan at door tips. How do you know if it is Elijah come to drink, or a seeping rainbow
angel ravaging, filled with plagues? I keep mistaking the blessed beggar. Invitations to rag footed travelers leave me perpetually breadless.
Recipe for Creation
First her feet swing, out from the sheathed sleeping venue they have been incubating in. When the floorboards feel contact both she and they are created again. When the blind
opens upon an eon, buzzing moment, day, wing lashes falter light fractures up into a pantheon of shades recognized and changed.
Third comes bird prayer, and the circuity of clocks consciousness, fear, all vast chambers, demonic undertow, Bosch.
Armor, a glamour, potency slung into purses. Protection and sustenance rushed in at the beginning.
She enters descending, as a city springs forth aware only as she turns her plastic beads in new directions. Every element colors, renewing continually as planets
revolve, and to do lists resubmit their presence. Can Becoming really happen on a time line? Her answers begin with, a week is a long way seeded with restoration, and avenues spread thick under
Robins, signify new beginnings. Daily she believes in failure, as her attempts bud, suckle, and reroute.
Grace Curtis
Merrill’s Cup for Joey
How can I take you into the deepest part— the place we have longed to inhabit—if we can’t lay light-enough fingers onto the tear drop of the Ouija Board, onto Merrill’s cup, cannot scribble unblinking ‘til dawn and pull spleens through navels or revel in the dazzle
of chemistry, what value, gods? What is the depth, in meters, of that which we seek and where does it lie—in the deepest or, rather in the reeds of shallows? Isn’t our life simply put, just laundry and bills? I once compared an empty nest in the crab apple tree
out front—the dirty, clay-glued nest of an angry robin—to a chipped tea pot on a shelf, my life work to the tide, you to a seeker of numbers, divining saints in the curves of their holiness. How I, no, how we long to touch it; how we
experiment, kissing lamp posts and blades of grass, groping. Some people’s search is a headfirst dive into the shallow end and rightly so. Better perhaps, than drinking the river one flute-full at a time.
A Tropical Fruit
Zero degree Fahrenheit—and it’s snowing in another language ganik, big, feather-light, pulverized white frost and I am the official, unofficial idiot in a snowstorm. All around me are pests, viruses, parasites placing stress on my dear-bought comfort. There is no mitten protection here where I am both docent and tour guide, doing what others swear by. Heat is blocked by walls of metal, aluminum alloys, unflattering social parallels notwithstanding. You can sneak behind enemy lines, destroy bridges, crawl through swamps but, I dream of simply walking away, away from the cold, the snow, the pestilence, perhaps to Tuscany, with its beautiful landscapes, bookish draw, like a painting, the place that should mean something different than the place I longed to see so long ago, my renaissance. Now, I only dream of seamless panty hose, and tropical fruit, of the time we waited for the time we’d say, “Where is the Wall?” in a city of a thousand minarets with its Paris-inspired maidans and avenues. I long to be there, amid the normalizing words, worlds, the meanings and systematic aberrations, where we amass power by simply being and not by being something. I long to be in the place of, at-will, sets and resets, ignoring thick black lines of minds, of maps that only give the illusion of stasis, where there is no repercussion for a choice that makes you happy, where each sinker and hook is cut away.
Olbers’ Paradox
It’s an important observation—the night sky is black. If space is infinite, then every point in the sky must eventually point to a star. The universe, not infinitely big, not infinitely old, must end at the edge of the yard, proof that a river stops at its bend, that black does not evade but absorb, that gray is immersion leaning toward the reflection of everything, that a heart yearns for what it thinks it leans toward. Someone once said to me, Gracie, all your answers are inside of you, knowledge leaning toward ignorance. What is left depends upon what reflects, what photons are taken in, what photons are reflected back. If you combine red, green and blue crayons you have black leaning toward night, each color sharing equally in the argument against infinity.
Dylan C. Lewis
When theGypsy Women Come
Urban legend has it they come every summer
to our suburban neighborhood, descending like locusts
or some other plague from the Old Testament.
My wife demands we change our locks,
as I plead with her that they do not have a key
in the first place. I fancy them far more romantic
than dangerous; colorful scarves serpentine in black coal hair
framing Red Delicious cheeks. Magenta knee socks peek out
from long layered skirts, covering a thief’s thigh,
which I will never see but playfully muse
the possibility that one may steal my chaste thoughts,
throw them in the back of her covered wagon
and ride away to the tune of wind chimes and horses’ hooves.
A Love Poem for the Colored Help
She is delicate likethe algae green sheath of budding spring grass rising from mushroom manure. She is the weightless hem
on a knee length skirt that ripples in the wind of spring’s last storm. When dusk approaches, she is the elongated shadow gently nudging me
from across the room, caressing my faceless form. The riddling pitch of her voice hides wide-eyed behind corners, like children’s
laughter from an attic playroom. And it is her foot steps that signal fresh lemonade with mint leaves and sing the blues on this muggy, late summer’s eve.
Lost in the North Side One Year Later
Too many lines converge as asphalt liquefies under the ghostly horizon. I can’t hold your hand or pour my emotions into a travel mug for you to consume because telephone lines look yellow in the setting sun and I’m bitter with love. So you focus, driving like a man chasing a checkered flag – but your hands aren’t calloused and I would shave my legs
if you wanted to feel something smooth on your palm. I’m misconstrued in our small cockpit world, insignificant statements are giant when they echo off canyons back through your convertible top. My life and thoughts are no larger than that pinhead of a star sifting through irrelevance on the brink of pink clouds. Neither that star, nor I, will ever shine any brighter. I’ll just hold the map of southern California until we see the next hitchhiker
with a shine box for my manners. He can break the silence and force us to answer the nagging question of “what we mean to each other”. Unfamiliarity is a dead give away that some one is about to prod and prey until they crack you like a clam
and extract your insides. If I am left disemboweled on the side of the PCH, small rodents will feed their young and the hungry waves will usher in the evening fog.
Sergio Ortiz
Nightmares, Secrets, and Museums
Think of me as Dionysus, home, resting with a fetus in my left leg. Think of me as lasting less than a candle or a rock. This road we travel is a puff, a shake, an unexpected vibration on earth’s surface. It does not fancy us here. We barely have enough time to learn a few lessons when we’re gone. Grapes shrivel, leaves fade back to their sepia dwellings. Think of me as a wordless translation of a poem dwelling in the silent space all over this museum, like secrets in a secret language.
The Sides of a Mirror
There is no other choice than to remain secure in the cargo hold for what is stored in lower spaces of the ships we navigate is nothing other than the individual parts of what is ready to become the deconstruction of our anatomical filth. Heart and lung machines rot side by side sexual strings. This rubbish causes parsnip infection, a corrupt bitterness in our poisonous watercourse. This is what we gain from a peep. This, the sum of what we see before a fuller glimpse.
Poetry,
the petal moored to a glace, as if its mysterious shape opened out of its body to lean against the smile of old drifter waiting for some kind of absolution upon the church’s steps. The tourist does not move, his eyes inspect his own tanned shoulders, then he notices a plastic bag to the right ofthe unassisted, a well kept treasure, the intimacy of a home, with suspicion.
David Hughes
Bipolar
Linda said she’d
had enough of working fifty
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Dark Lady Poetry, 2010. All Rights Reserved. ISSN 2152-8594