Wearing sunglasses in January,
she was thin and buzzing
like coffee and bumblebees
with a face blurred by makeup
and the vagueness that comes
between thirty-five and fifty.
She was trying to write a check
for something like tires or maybe
brakes for a Buick but she couldn’t
find her license, so in harried anger
dumped the contents of her purse
on top of my counter and it was all there:
the lipstick, cell phone, eye liner, Ipod,
wallet & a small black tiny gun that spun
like a top as soon as it hit the counter.
That, she said as she scooped the gun
back into her purse, was a huge pain in
the ass to get: I had to sit in a crowded
CCW class at the county building
with all kinds, young and old, white and black,
male, female, gay and straight and they
were all so happy and scared just to be
able to carry a gun and, of course,
I got fingerprinted and there was a long
line for that too, something like fifty deep
at eight o’clock on a Tuesday morning
and there I was already late for work
but I just had to have this because you know
how it is these days…
and finally, the check
was written, and a few days later, bounced back.
impotence
lately, there have been no words
as ideas have stopped flowing through
my head even though I keep typing away
like a junkie trying to tap into an overused vein.
My typing produces nothing save
half-baked poems like the one I thought
about this morning while stuck at the light,
an ancient Chrysler minivan in front of me
with it’s white paint peeling and a bumper sticker
that said, My Daughter is in the US Army.
I thought about the daughter.
I thought she might be short and squat
and I could see her in some desert
with a rifle in her hand, her hair
greasy and tucked into her hat,
her body shapeless and vague
in camouflage fatigues.
And then I imagined the daughter
coming home, getting married,
driving a minivan of her own
with the paint peeling away.
The light turned green, the van went straight
and I turned right, the poem quickly died
and I started to think what I could do
to make it move.
Roberta Lawson
Cento
Finally, he wants to write…
The secrets of the girls childhood
finally tumbled –
especially if they’ve been mishandled.
Reassuring benefits
dress in a handy, pocket-sized format.
Fancy.
(You don’t need to do anything.
This is not the novel he wants to write;
this reassuring tracker of girls.)
These balls of community dough
not recommended for
pregnant women:
The benefits of a
fancy dress blood donor.
You don’t need to do anything
for the fullest, most rewarding life.
Balls of dough, mishandled
like lactating women
speak of this soon…
Handy, pocket-sized secrets
for a serious buyer.
Wind-Down
Later in the day than
either of us knew existed.
Wrapped up in quiet night-time
and the slow-heat of your body,
curled sage & incense wafts
wind about the room with
their unfurling fingers.
You ask the wrong question,
and like strange magic
my tears begin
a silent procession.
‘Sweetie, what
on earth is wrong?’
you ask me, blinking.
I guess I just felt safe.
Quincy Lehr
Apartments
No ghosts as yet, but just a hint of fever
(the fan’s still in its box) and foreign noise.
A virgin phone squats on its new receiver.
Undusty window sills are bare but ready
for clocks, for brown, anaemic plants, their poise
temporary, fragile and unsteady.
There have been other places, across the river,
or oceans, time zones—other furniture,
with curtains cutting light to just a sliver,
those old apartments populated still
with women whom you recollect as ‘her’.
They haven’t called; you doubt they ever will.
Each lease becomes an act of… not forgetting,
but somehow letting go. Old places live
with different faces in a familiar setting:
lives you’ll never know, but comprehend,
scenes of errors not yours to forgive,
broken hearts no longer yours to mend.
Let there be light!
And in the beginning, there was nothing,
or what there always was, and is, perhaps,
flawed symmetry, as the child was born,
the act of birth the act of replacement
implying obsolescence,
the loss of vigour, blurred sight,
the often-repeated joke,
the punch line like a show in syndication,
the actors long since dead,
floating into the ether of living rooms.
P.A. Levy
when the boys come home
the girls working
in the flag factory
widows-to-be
out pouring
all their semaphore poetry
wait for their boys
with well rehearsed folds
they’ve seen it many times
on prime time news broadcasts
pulsing hearts
pulsing he
pulse
half mast
Robert Lietz
Ocean Audience (2)
Should you import such images, alerted by sines
and contraband, by natural restrictions,
leathers digging in, finding the sun above the house,
the scythe-blade dulled and slopes
made dangerous, the shadows indoors restored,
what would there be to do
except to see lives graduate, adopt their readiness
to grip, except, as one absorbed, and one
with them, to seem as one within the script, and with
the light let fall behind the cardinal draperies,
happy as meals were, as uninventoried light
deciding on a subject? And here,
among the spellbound-still accoutrements, left-overs
concentrate, in love and motion still,
and their phenomenally touched selves, seeing
their lawns to snuff or pouring off their own,
in rooms where lives conceived becoming something once,
in pillared rooms and sleeplessness
and dreadful circulation, warped frames
and needle-stitch, their scythes
made dull for every pass through the sandgrasses,
and love’s morphologies, and the kempt lawns
turned by the beach-skies to hyperscripts. Why
wouldn’t you cheer with them such nights
when home-squads dominate, seeing them cheered
themselves, or handing their bodies off
in lexial harmonics, thrilled by the first
good tune, by the cacoons
and plastics scratching frost-hewn stones, mothers
coming to be, there on the eve of everything,
and children, evolved dimensionally, gliding
among the cloud-drifts and the painted trees,
over the front lawns taking time and personalized?
So much for the decades practicing.
So much for the hall doors, the varnished
and adult mystery, deepening
weekend dreams, deepening the hobbies woven,
the skeletal awkwardness
and household interests, for living old
and off, hearing the tall grass sob,
seasonally drawn and stretched, and seeing
the wheat hued light assume
a steeper influence, following the scores
and story-lines and satellite attentions,
the pre-venting scripts, centripetal gradients
and chills, caculated back to stasis
and to outlet benefits.
Breaking In
Filling a page when he might just as well
have filled a page, he likes the raw materials
the ammonia-haunted bowls, expressions the old men shared
among the riggings and the fiscs,
susceptible to prompts, to the motions just behind
the layings-on and arrogance. Verve deepens
in the templates, in the course of vegetables, in every
leisure to know, leaving the closed shops caught
and the keen edge of argument, fingers clearing out
the cache, spilling the ghostly fruit, the ghosts
already gone into the lull on entering, deepening
the whispers in old port and in the dream-souffles.
He’ll let the barn-mice jig, he thinks, wearing
the scraps of festival, perked and erudite, subverting
the swaggers afterward, the children worrying
their lives, and every awkward emphasis, having
these ermine, egg-white, scarlet points
to get across, and doubling the detachment
when their good fun’s done.
Phil Lucas
The Silence of the Suburbs
The silence of the suburbs,
ebony still.
Coolly gazing heaven
loosely fingers
the half moon,
and stars puff sleepily
into the shawl of the dark.
The last jet of nightfall
lumbers upwards,
grudgingly,
with 400 new adventurers
tightly dreaming
of what will be.
And there below
is fat Jim Ferry
rolling
from the rumble-mumble electric train.
“There’ll be a better tomorrow,”
his sozzled heart grumbles,
and he loosens his tie
in anticipation
of what will never come.
The half moon is hazy now
and the stars yawn,
“it’s just another jet
in the clasping smoke of still.”
Fat Jim Ferry looks to the skies.
“Clouds,”
he whispers,
alone.
The silence of the suburbs,
ebony still.
Lunchtime Black
She sits
only for an hour.
But,
there is no golden revelation
at the bottom of a snatched paper cup.
No answer
between nervous bites
from a wilted balsa wood sandwich.
Not even
a smile to the sun,
as she beats away the swarm
of office edicts,
will set her free.
Just a hope
that she is not another face
amongst this conjurors’ madness of souls.
That alone
may see her through.
Do What’s Good For You
“Dirty seaweed,”
mother says.
“Put it down
and eat your burger.”
Alexis Lykiard
Faking Whoopee
We’re on a mission saving you every penny! Both premise and brash promise (like how many?
imply a simply vast benevolence, pace The Morrisons Experience.
What lies behind those words, what truth, if any?
Revalue life, the best Free Gift, and save far more
by mere avoidance of a big bluff Superstore.
Epitaphs for the Blessed Margaret
Graffito For A Grave
Writ large on a wall
somewhere in Brixton: IRON
LADY? RUST IN PEACE
Shopping For The Nation
Her greed-grocer mind
spelled Upward Mobility whatever the price
Early Learner In The Class Struggle
Young ‘Snobby Roberts’
reinvented herself, moved
on, waging worse wars
Osborne at Her Obsequies
A clown’s tears, facile:
they’re all in this together,
Tory crocodiles!
Andrzej Łyszkowicz
Terrifying Fruit
Like a magnifying glass
against the dark sun
training violence and vice
on a tiny speck of arm.
So the body in its minute
part experiences the pain
and horror of murder,
torture and abuse.
To say: this is real, and real;
To say: this is not real, not real.
But the seed has been sown
so it will grow to bear
its terrifying fruit.
Blind Night
It’s a blind night that speaks to you —
let it spill under your heel
Change
The improbability of change
hit him in the gut
with the impact of a bullet.
He stirred his coffee carefully,
looked at it,
poured it into the sink.
Never again will he
fool himself into believing.
The Edifices of Tomorrow
When the waiting ends
the hours sigh with regret
drop one by one,
retired soldiers of forgotten campaigns.
It’s no longer possible
to buy you flowers or go for a walk.
Let’s storm the edifices of tomorrow,
fill them with cries of joy and terror.
