September 2002 | back-issues, poetry
[b]Allegory of X[/b]
Being chased toward
a cliff in the night
that divides land
from the absence of land
with no warning save
the gravel that tumbles
away from itself.
[b]Internet[/b]
Gleaming water-skimmers race,
stop, start, collide and multiply,
converge–instant constellations–and disperse
over a widening puddle.
[b]A River[/b]
The current takes
lull and rapids
into a circle
with no tangent
at stream or sea.
Soil from the banks
is gathered,
sold in pouches
for its powers,
among them
shaping waters
and, in spring,
reversing their course.
[b]Further Shores[/b]
The sea that roars
gently in a shell
also crashes in a cup
held to the ear,
among other vessels
whose tides have only
to be taken up;
their further shores, named.
[b]Grand Canyon[/b]
For epochs, water
has cut with clear knife
and worn with slow polishing
layered depths of rock
while, for epochs, rock
has dammed the floods deeper,
dissolving into hosts of currents
that, slowing, leave
sediments of future stone
or, flowing by, build
stalactites in caves downstream.
[b]One Flesh[/b]
How could we prove
more
than the sum of our parts?
We’re already two backs,
four ankles, twelve saliva glands,
forty digits.
And more.
We are already eight tear ducts,
countless illusions.
by J. D. Smith (c)2002
([email]smitros34 [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
[b]Author’s Note:[/b]
J. D. Smith’s publications include the collection The Hypothetical Landscape (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series) and the edited anthology Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn Gould (John Gordon Burke). J. D.’s poems have been nominated for Pushcart Awards in 2000 and 2001, and his prose has appeared in American Book Review, Connecticut Review, and Literal Latte.
September 2002 | back-issues, poetry
[b]Angle of Repose[/b]
In the red light of highway protocol
All traffic stalled
A burnished wreck for sunset
Time to pause, as the book says, time to reflect.
Words come so easy till we know their source
And find it wanting-
In need of sympathy or recompense
Say, a fat check
For the fat man stricken in the road
Now out of body, now at the plastic faux pearl gates
Never having seen the equally fat toad
That sits in loam and gravel
Under the guardrail.
Sits. And waits.
Waits for the green light
Of understanding-nothing-being
The toad’s just a toad
And the fat man is dead.
[b]The Story[/b]
Mixed in some celestial silver bowl
the dark meat of our psychic turkeys
and the bowels of our cow souls
doled out cold in dollops dropped
about the land and sea and no one
knows, not even He, which plops
will rot, which plops will grow.
Or so it was explained to me
however many years ago, this recipe
for immortality, a la Voodoo Nanny
while I rocked on her bony knee
pondering the wrinkles of her breasts,
her Virginia Slims, the way she blew
the smoke over her shoulder, out of
harm’s way, took a sip of coffee and
always wiped her lips before she spoke
again, repeating the story just for me
Dark meat . . . silver bowl . . .
[b]Fifteen Minutes[/b]
until it’s time to leave for work.
I need to shower and shave
but won’t do either, though today’s the day
the boss makes her appearance and I’ll feel forced
to tell her “I know my face looks rough
right now, but in a week it won’t.
I’m growing my beard out for a while.”
She’ll understand. Last week she understood
my hesitation with the piss-test
surprised as I was
to be asked to drive the company van
to the clinic come 10:30 a.m.
So I took a couple of minutes
and rang up an orange juice, if she didn’t mind
and was off. Just about a half hour
to Bellingham Occupational Health wherein
I sat at least two and a half hours, reading
about the exploits of our CIA-
darling gone awry, Osama Bin Laden
my bladder swelling, ready to explode.
by Christian Peet (c)2002
([email]ranchproductions [at] hotmail [dot] com[/email])
[b]Author’s Notes:[/b]
Christian Peet is a Bennington graduate, winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize, and a semester away from a Goddard MFA. Thus he has worked as a dishwasher/prepcook, carpenter’s apprentice, sheetmetal fabricator, hired hand on a goat farm, maintenance man, landscaper, and convenience store clerk. His screenplay for the short film Jack & Cat was just produced by 257 Films, and recent poems appear or are forthcoming in Dazzling Mica, Spent Angel, Eclectica, and The Adirondack Review. Christian lives in northwest Washington.
September 2002 | back-issues, fiction, Michael W. Giberson
We had this big old Chinese elm tree by our patio taken out last year. Now a two hundred square foot area next to the patio is nothing but dirt, which my two ninety-mile-per-hour Australian shepherds are constantly tracking onto the patio. So my wife wants me to lay flagstones over the whole area to keep the patio clean. It will take about a ton of stone, which runs around twenty cents a pound, for a total cost of about four hundred dollars. I figure I’m getting off cheap; she could have insisted on extending the concrete patio slab, which would cost a couple of grand.
So Sunday morning I start leveling out the dirt by the patio, and I immediately hit the stump of the Chinese elm, which the guys we paid to take the tree out the year before only ground down to about an inch below ground level. This is too high to lay flagstones over and too low to do anything decorative with, so I get out my ax and start chopping, figuring to lower the level of the stump just enough so I can lay the stones over it. But I hit a live PVC water pipe, which is charged with about 60 lbs of water pressure, but has no shut off valve. What kind of an idiot lays a live plastic water pipe with no shut-off valve, four inches below the surface, for the next idiot to come along and chop through?
Instant geyser.
So the yard is now mud and the patio is flooded, which seriously ticks my wife off. I shut down the main water valve, which interrupts her laundry and ticks her off even more. I dig up the pipe and find three more pipes, all tangled around the roots where the Chinese elm gradually screwed them up over its 25-year life span. Now I have to dig a trench a couple of feet over, paralleling the original pipes, in order to re-route them away from the stump. I break two more pipes in the process. There are huge piles of dirt all over the lawn.
I go to Orchard Supply Hardware and buy the various pipes and fittings and cans of PVC glue and stuff that I need to repair the pipes but that I naturally don’t have in the huge collection of pipe and sprinkler fittings that I have accumulated over twenty years of repairing my lawn sprinklers.
I manage to cap off the live pipe (the other pipes are connected to the sprinklers and have proper valves and timers at their seminal ends, so they don’t have water perpetually flowing through them with no way to cut them off if by chance they get dinged by a shovel-wielding ignoramus) and I turn the water back on. Now my wife can finish washing my clothes and my daughter can take one of her frequent and interminable showers, but not before I have to make another trip to Orchard to buy another 14-cent fitting that I didn’t realize I didn’t have, but which is absolutely essential to the undertaking.
Now it’s nightfall, so I say to hell with it and I quit for the night, leaving great piles of mud, shovels, pickaxes, pliers, wrenches, broken bits of pipe, debris, and miscellaneous PVC fittings all over the lawn for the dogs to run off with and hide. I track mud into the house and all over the kitchen floor, and get dirt all over my wife’s new throw rug, which ticks her off all over again.
So Monday night, I get off work and go back out there, leaving the wife to go to the daughter’s open-house at school without me, which ticks them BOTH off. I finish re-routing the pipes, cover them up with the dirt from the piles on the lawn, get all the roots, broken pipe pieces, and trash picked up and tossed, get all the tools put away, and now it’s o-dark-hundred hours again. So I quit for the night. And now I’m right back where I was when I first started the project.
Today I’m going to see if I can rent a stump grinder to finish the job that the tree people got paid $1600 a year ago to not finish.
My wife says she doesn’t understand how I can make things so complicated. All she wanted was a few flagstones to keep the dogs from dragging dirt onto the patio.
September 2002 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
sitting on the front porch
I listen to the nuclear family
across the street meltdown
it’s Chernobyl, Rolling Hills Dr.
Wichita Kansas where life
moves like wheat in a high wind
a woman walking her dog
stops to witness the madness
as a man bursts from the house
he lugs a tattered tote bag
which he tosses into the trunk
of 1970’s vintage Americana
the broker from next door
steps outside drinking a beer
and shakes his head disgusted
we are all spectators
the man’s wife, carrying a child
runs out pleading to him
as he drives away, backfiring
September 2002 | back-issues, Patrick Seth Williams, poetry
I stand at the door to apartment four in the “blue building”, Emporia Kansas, address unimportant. Even at 20, I have the same nervousness of a teen on a first date. I swallow hard, putting on a fa�ade of confidence, and knock soundly on the veneer covered door.
At 17, I was a dreamer. I still am. The things I dreamed then accomplished or future goals; my dreams of today, goals of tomorrow. S was girlish at 20, a Disney aficionado, on the Student Senate at the local college, grounded. She was too good of a person to be dating a hotwired senior in high school hell-bent on escaping the midwestern cultural doldrums. In ways I never left.
During Christmas break, after my first semester of my second college year, I arranged to meet with S to renew our friendship, having seen each other once since we’d broken our relationship two years prior. An encounter so tension filled, it was hard to breathe. However, when she walked into the vestibule at my fast-food pocket-change job, every nerve in my body exploded and instantaneously prodded me for not being the person I am now, then. S was a woman.
S opens the door to her apartment and throws her arms around my neck. Well aware that I made the five hour trip from school to home late last night. Leaving after my last final and room check, finally passing the last exit out of Springfield at shortly after ten o’clock at night to make our scheduled lunch date.
“What do you want to eat?” S inquires. On our first date, I’d taken her to eat Chinese, managing to find a decent restaurant in the booming metropolis of 30,000. I smile at her; silently hoping the business was still there.
Driving down 6th Street, my car showing remnants of last night’s frenzied move. For a friend I am willing to do several things, but what I attempted the night before was insane. Driving on six hours sleep, after getting trashed on tequila the preceding night. But this is different, S graduates the next day, I leave for Michigan in a week, the next time we would see each other unknown.
Seated and ordered, I scan the zodiological placemat. I am the rooster; coo coo ca choo. Habit, I should have it memorized the number of times I have eaten Chinese. Conversation is sparse, typical–the look in S’s eye that she is busily processing something.
We eat, S sans chopsticks, talking about graduation and Grad school. Staring at a couple of years left of undergrad, I am hell bent to move on. Very familiar in attitude, some things never change. By the time proper fortune cookie etiquette has been established and the bill taken care of, I am sure S had figured out what was coming next.
As we get back into the car, I asked S if she has anything else on her schedule for the day. She’s cleared it. It had been her idea to do “something crazy” when we had gone on first date. What we ended up doing was walking around Peter Pan Park amidst the others enjoying the late August weather.
“I think I know where we are going,” S says it, but doesn’t completely blow the ego-trip I have developed planning this day out. I pull back on to 6th taking it to Prairie then South winding my way around. “Here we are,” S apparently navigating now, manages to get it out before I have a chance to say anything, while parking the car on a side street adjacent to the Park.
Even for May the air is brisk and the slight overcast makes it even cooler. I grab S’s present out of the car. At least she had not spotted it! We walk along one of the well-beaten trails that lead around the pond. At the end of the trail is an alcove with a bronze statue of William Allen White, our destination.
In August, the position of the sun while it sets allows it to shine through a clearing and shimmer on the pond’s surface. A perfect vantage point of this spectacle is from White’s alcove, and where S and I had ended up sitting the first time we visited the Park. I was blabbering on, shoving my foot in my mouth over ACT scores, when I saw S shift uncomfortably. My reaction was instinct; I brushed S’s hair away from her face and leaned in…
S is sitting right under the ledge she’d been dangling her feet over when our lips first met, as I hand her Disney gift bag. S digs through it: a CD, Introduction to Meditation by Alan Watts, my chapbook, Lifesavers, crayons, and lastly a bag of marbles for when she lost hers in Grad school. Laughing, S also pulls out a computer speaker cord that had managed its way into the bag during my hasty dorm room cleaning. Three shades of red and in tears, I laugh right along with her, reminding myself to have a serious rethinking of preparation skills.
I notice her shiver before she says anything, and am ready to leave myself. This time there will be no piggyback ride, no holding hands, just walking side-by-side S’s graduation present suspended from her fingers. The moment should be bittersweet, when we had left the Park 3 years prior we were on the ascent of a new relationship, now we are looking at undeterminable gaps in being able to speak face-to-face. I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if I could have changed, maybe made S my dream. Would it have matter? I shake my head smiling, knowing that S and I will always exist in points of time.
September 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
she is talking
about her thirteenth year
about her mother’s lover
the sound of his footsteps
as she lay in bed
the press of his weight
just outside her door
^
it’s the same story
told
a thousand different ways
it’s the boyfriend who
passed her on to his buddies
for beer or pot or a
new set of tires
it’s everything
she was forced to do
^
and she is talking
about love
she is saying
she believes
is saying she doesn’t
want to be alone
tells me she doesn’t
expect me
to understand
