Being Me The Trip across Texas is mine. Well, it’s in my name. The bank picks up the tab, I grab the fantasy: he practices my autograph in a cheap motel like a kid does Mickey Mantle’s. His girlfriend is horny, pretty and young, naked but for an anklet with chain linked to a ring on her toe. Her thighs are tattooed with flames. He says, “Wait one Goddamn minute,” goes out to test my card on a carton of Camels, beer and a convenience store rose. “YES, YES,” she shouts applauding his success. … Continue reading Being Me by Thomas Michael McDade→
Accidental Stowaway from Singapore, no papers or passport, surname unknown, Short-tailed Babbler, Japanese White-eye, Orange-bellied Flowerpecker, whoever you are, passing passerine, drawn to perch on a lifeboat winch by some crumb or flash of an earring as tugs yank the ship out into channel and two days later, in the South China Sea, you’re stuck too, nowhere to flee from here to horizon, as shown by forays of fluttering panic over the waves and back before exhaustion drowns you, little prisoner, condemned to be transported to a dirtier city, or if you hang on … Continue reading Accidental by Stephen Cushman→
Voices I would be sitting there idly twirling the strawberry perched on top of the plump red pincushion while she was hunched over the singer filigreed foot pedal making rhythmical clicking sounds as sky blue fabric folded in creamy waves under the needle mother’s voice soft and dreamy answering someone only she could hear a revelation to me that anyone else could have a surging inner-life when I had always assumed each stitch every sigh was meant for me alone Janice Bowen says, “When poetry found me, I was lollygagging — leading an easy … Continue reading Voices by Janice Bowen→
Woman at the Post Office An old woman’s trouble in deciding is holding up the line. Another crowd, another time, a loudmouth might complain, but here in mid-morning, the retired, mothers, students, all stand quiet. Her jaw slowly slackening, insistence draining from her face. Finally, she lifts her finger —a pronouncement, or merely a flicker?— and the clerk says, that’ll be seven-fifty. We witnesses stop holding our breath. She reaches into her bag, that reflex intact, and no wonder, considering how a woman’s life is comprised of procurement. The clerk hands back her change. … Continue reading Woman at the Post Office by Kristen Staby Rembold→
On a wintry late afternoon in the early 1960s, I was driving from Providence, Rhode Island, where I studied at Brown University, to my apartment in Waltham, Massachusetts. I did this three days a week – a ride of anywhere from one-and-a-half to two hours, depending on weather and traffic conditions. Sometimes I took the train in the morning and my husband Darryl would come to pick me up in the afternoon. This seemed a reasonable accommodation to the fact that the one job he’d been offered was in Boston, while my one fellowship was … Continue reading Power Failures→
[frame align=”right”][/frame]In my twenties I thought of language as a bridge, not from one place to another, but above an abyss. The damnation waiting below was ordinary chaos, the dissonant march of hours, the rush of unsorted, simultaneous emotions – terror, desire, depression, exultation – swirling together without structure or purpose. Raw consciousness, natural and unimpeded. I needed some artifact of the patterning mind to survive nothing more terrible than my daily life, and I found in words the material for these necessary shapings. I had always loved words, found them concrete, caressable. Never a … Continue reading Poetry as Reprieve→
I Revise I revise because images, like moth wings, grow, hidden in secret shrouds, because the sun never stops seeking an oak in every acorn, because milkweed, beautiful in bloom offers wind-borne gifts to the earth in autumn. I revise because the sky molds and re-forms clouds the way a sculptor works wet clay. I revise because the Muse is a shape-shifter who lifts me up on eagle wings at dawn. By dusk, we crawl the ground as ants. I revise because I like surprises, poems that turn themselves inside-out like tee-shirts ready for … Continue reading I Revise; Critic; Happiness by Jean Sampson→
Letterpress, Bangor I, too, discern it: an impression of the impression left on leaves, the broadside’s bite, an invitation through the mail in a bygone, backhanded braille. The leaden shadows that hide there, in our words. Type lives on, thank Gutenberg, in our unsubtle century, with a pass through Whitman’s fingers— This latent mine—these unlaunch’d voices— but rarer and rarer, slipped shophand to shophand, rarer and rarer is the specimen in recto that spares the verso. We don’t look verso, indent-bent. The LED is our screen, it projects only forward, the LEAD is some … Continue reading Letterpress, Bangor; Herd, Sheepscot; Vibrations, Crystal by Kevin McFadden→
A Tomato, Like Love, starts small, a fuzzy flimsy seedling sneaky worms would secretly undercut. You could almost miss its yellowish blossom that becomes a fruit, hard and green at first, slowly ripening in increasing light, growing fuller and rounder and smoother. A tangy air, not altogether pleasant, and a certain prickliness surround it. One day it simply falls into your hand, that thin taut skin barely able to contain the sticky red juice that wants to burst out at the slightest pressure of the very tip of knife or fingernail or tooth or … Continue reading A Tomato, Like Love; Balm; Answered by Michael McFee→
Popillia Japonica For rows of sun-buttered, glistening corn, red and green trimmed vines of tomatoes wrapping themselves around silvery rusted poles, thick fields of gummy blooming tobacco, tangled thrusts of okra and lean stalks of string beans, plump pumpkins and cantaloupe, they came. Some think they rode over, camouflaged in the beautiful, murderous kudzu. Others that we brought them here purposely, despite or unaware of their hunger, like gems. Papa called them pests, bastards, Japanese—beetles no different from morning glories or Johnson grass, or me puffing the fluffy seeds of dandelions. Instead of apple … Continue reading Popillia Japonica; Naivete by Angie Hogan→
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