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→
Optional Yoga at Sunrise We’re told to drop into each breath then release the air like wind in the trees. Outside, a windmill slices light. The murmuring pines are all piñons. The desert flows into the mountains. The air is dry as sand. We’re told to look but not to focus, but I can close both eyes and follow a ripple of wind across a lagoon where it reaches a beach outlined by palms, barely ruffling their fronds. My yoga wants to be the balmy kind, the early morning dozing kind. With practice and … Continue reading Optional Yoga at Sunrise by Daniel Becker→
Letter to the Body If only you were the pure self, we would not have to bargain or pray, offer up good deeds for relief of pain, or apologies for spasms and expectorations. The cells could absorb and discharge at leisure. Whatever waste washes ashore in the brain or in the heart, would, without shame, increase the one being. No struggle to justify, no explaining we’re really much better than our hunched back, our protuberances, just the material presence, occupying space, insular and detaching, floating away for a day on the sea’s silver face, … Continue reading Letter to the Body by Roselyn Elliott→
Self Check-out Of course I have my doubts, but when no one’s looking I pretend I’m someone else: the tightrope walker, The Great Farini, crossing Niagara Falls with a man on my back. Or the veiled beekeeper squeezing the bellows of my smoker to calm the hive. I wish I could reverse time to meet the doctor who, so eager to rid my mother of scarlet fever, told her to cut her rocking horse’s mane, told her it would grow back. I’d explain how a lie rearranges the world, and in a very dangerous … Continue reading Two Poems by Charlotte Matthews→
Teresa Lewis They are raising amnesty signs along the courthouse road portraits with her missing lateral incisor filled in perhaps to make her look more like themselves perhaps taking back the tooth-for-a-tooth. In their silence I recall her singing “I need a miracle” and her voice is not empty more like a bowl with overflowing reminders of how long it’s been since I sang for anything. I will be eating artichokes when her veins drink that final cocktail devouring the heart while the maple leaves shout with their loudest colored voices, falling quietly on … Continue reading Teresa Lewis; Choosing the Nude by Lisa Ryan→
Sunday School Here’s what I’m thinking: Why does a duck need an ark? What’s a flood to a duck? The teacher says I ask too many questions. I raise my hand again, thinking if we didn’t have teachers would we ever have to raise our hands? I won’t eat tomatoes. The slices in a white bowl are like pieces of someone, Saint Somebody of the Better Boys. I might go out and play David and Goliath this afternoon. Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be the giant. Everybody wants to be … Continue reading Sunday School; The Passion of Bursars by Michael Chitwood→
Rehearsal The best thing about the house I grew up in was that it sat at the edge of a small weedy lake where my mother and I would row to a raft through a thick tangle of water lilies, their white cups floating above green saucers. She would tie a rope around my chest, hold it taut and walk the edge of the raft as I flailed in the water learning to swim. Now I walk the tight perimeter of loss, love’s ligaments stretching between us as she prepares to swim out of … Continue reading Three Poems by Sharron Singleton→
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→
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