Contributors to the Fall Issue 2009

Selections from the Fall Issue 2009

LIKE DISAPPEARING INK

I sit to read and see the sun ascend.
This day lights up the words, illuminates
a thought I had nearly forgotten—friend
of youth consigned to back pages, lost dates.
The golden strands of beauty memorized
have thinned through time to couplet or quatrain
careworn and gray, though once with vigor prized,
profusions passed from overheated brain.
I draw this robe around me tighter still.
A lone crow caws and smudges palest sky.
Beneath September morning’s slightest chill
the emptiness of winter hovers by
and makes of me a watcher of the clouds
as bridal veils dissolve to sheerest shrouds.

Erin Garstka

GRIEF

The passage grief must run is deep and slow.
A slant of light, a song, and tears still flow.
I feel again the sting of every scar,
the black and bleeding death of where dreams are.
I wait for you, as if our lives entwined
had never struck the knot.  The days unwind
upon an iron spool of time.
And yet,
some days bring golden noons, and I forget
this primal ache, exchanging pain for grace,
accepting slivers of relief.  Your face
I scarcely can remember for some hours
until the dark rolls in with tidal powers.

The passage grief must run is slow and long.
I crouch, ambushed by bars of light, a song . . .

Marianna Busching

OLD HORNY HAND OF TIME

Old horny hand of Time!  Our love defies
Your rusty sickle’s amputation of the flowers.
It’s not a blossom of the summer hours
That shows fresh petals only under friendly skies.

We’ve sunk thick roots into the soil of life,
We two, together.  Trunks grow face to face,
Wind their way upward; branches interlace,
The joining ridged and furrowed with long strife.

You’ll need a tool more brutal than that scythe
To loosen this embrace of full-grown trees.
No trembling buttercups to pluck at ease,
No pink and veined petals for your knife.

I listen: boasting words’ defiant breath.
Then in my ear, his idiot chainsaw, death.

Vito Victor

A HISTORY OF AMERICAN POETRY AFTER POUND

Too soon the language we’d inverted

        Waxed oh-so-private,

And polymorphous plaints perverted

Truth (without the sense to drive it).

Next, bards rejected metered rhyme

        For “No one heeds it.”

Now, poesy poses all the time---

To bore the one man left who reads it.

Michael Corrigan

FEEDING THE ROSES

Well, let me put it baldly, I’ve been sick,
and so my hair has left me, lock by curl,
till now I’m plucked completely.  Not a twirl
remains on my pearlaceous globe, sleek-slick.

But I’ve begun a heady new obsession:
hats!  And my collection grows each day
with top wear any wardrobe mistress, say,
would dearly pay to have in her possession.

Each morning I thus happily decide
what to place on my Chihuahua head.
What, exactly, goes with just that red,
so hat and garb precisely coincide.

Meanwhile, the hair no longer fixed to me
I’ve gathered up.  Now I await the fall
when I can spread it on the earth all
around my roses.
                                   I love to think I’ll be
like leaves, an autumn mulch, like them can bring
nourishment to roses come next spring.

Sandra Shaffer VanDoren

CHRISTMAS EVE

I really wonder where the Chinese find
Such tiny screws to hold toy parts in place.
My shaky fingers, aging eyes, half-blind,
Will need your help if we’re to win our race

Against the dawn.  The plan says this fits here
And if you press down hard and hold it tight,
With luck, I’ll work the driver into there
And twist and turn until I get it right.

The plan now says press open carefully
This part and slide that other into place,
Then brush my fingers inadvertently
And let your hair soft-sweep across my face

And then, instructions say in tiny print,
It’s time to kiss as if by accident.

John Byrne

THE IVY AND THE TREE

It starts like love, this close embrace
of ivy round the tree,
that year by year will grow in place
and kill by slow degree.

No premonitions fret the leaves
or set the sap astir;
the ivy whispers and deceives
the tree it would inter.

Lisa Barnett